WASHINGTON (AP) — The Democratic senators — eight in total — faced almost instant blowback from members of their own party as they voted to allow the Senate to move forward on compromise legislation that would reopen the government.
Their decision Sunday night was labeled a “betrayal” and “pathetic” by some of the most prominent voices in the Democratic Party.
“To my mind, this was a very, very bad vote,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats.
The group of defectors consisted of several senators who are retiring next year, as well as a number of former governors. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana praised them Monday morning, saying they “decided to put principle over their personal politics.”
The group of moderate Democrats surely knew the criticism that was coming when they broke with the rest of their party on the 40th day of the government shutdown. But after huddling for hours — often in the Senate basement — over the last week, each senator reached the same conclusion: It was time for the government shutdown to end.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire
Shaheen, a senior Democrat who will be retiring from the Senate, often took the lead in negotiating the compromise legislation to end the shutdown. She had made it a priority to extend subsidies for health plans offered under the Affordable Care Act, but she had also expressed reservations about voting to shut down the government.
In the end, she settled for a pledge from Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota to hold a vote in December on the health subsidies.
“This was the only deal on the table. It was our best chance to reopen the government and immediately begin negotiations to extend the ACA tax credits that tens of millions of Americans rely on to keep costs down,” she said at a news conference following the Sunday night vote.
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois
Durbin is another senator who will be retiring after a long Senate career. Durbin holds the No. 2 position in Democratic leadership and broke ranks with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York after saying that the shutdown had caused too much pain for the American people.
In a statement before the vote, Durbin, who argued that Republicans are still to blame for the shutdown, said, “This bill is not perfect, but it takes important steps to reduce their shutdown’s hurt. Not only would it fully fund SNAP for the year ahead, but it would reverse the mass firings the Trump Administration ordered throughout the shutdown.”
Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia
Kaine, a former Virginia governor, was one of the last Democrats to join the group willing to vote to advance to the bill. He said that, as late as Sunday evening, he was checking over the legislation with his staff. For him, the deciding factor was language in the funding bill that prevents President Donald Trump’s administration from conducting more mass layoffs — an issue that is particularly important for his state.
He called the agreement a “moratorium on mischief” and said he was only able to get the agreement as negotiations reached a crucial juncture.
“The kinds of just non-strategic mass firings and (reduction in force actions) that have traumatized federal employees since Inauguration Day, they can’t do them anymore,” Kaine said.
Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire
Hassan, a former governor, had been involved with negotiations from early on and emphasized that the threats to federal food aid had made the situation more urgent.
Hassan said she “heard from families about the deep pain that the government shutdown has caused, made worse by a president who illegally and repeatedly chose to cut off help for families who are just trying to buy groceries.”
“After weeks of bipartisan conversations,” she said Sunday, “I voted today to reopen the government so that we can get back to the work of helping Granite Staters.”
The government funding bill refills funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as well as ensuring that states that spent their own funds to keep it running during the shutdown will be reimbursed.
Sen. Angus King of Maine
King is an independent who caucuses with the Democratic Party and is a former governor. He had been voting since the outset to reopen the government, yet he also played a key role in the negotiations, including often hosting senators for talks in his Capitol basement office.
He has consistently said that he is opposed to using a government shutdown as a negotiating tactic, yet he also wanted Congress to extend the health care subsidies. After Republicans rejected a proposal from Schumer to extend the ACA tax credits for one year, King said it showed that the shutdown was not working.
“The question was: Does the shutdown further the goal of achieving some needed support for the extension of the tax credits? Our judgment was that it would not produce that result,” King said.
Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada
Rosen has grown increasingly irate as the shutdown has worn on and Republicans refused to give in to Democrats’ demands on the ACA credits. As air travel was increasingly affected by the shutdown, the economy of her home state of Nevada, a political swing state, was also under threat.
In a statement, Rosen said that Trump and fellow Republicans “are weaponizing their power in alarming ways to inflict unimaginable pain and suffering on working people, like fully withholding SNAP benefits and gutting our tourism industry by grinding air travel to a halt.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada
Cortez Masto is another Democrat who has been voting to reopen the government. She also emphasized that the impact to travel had been particularly harmful to Nevada and that the impacts to food assistance programs provided a new sense of urgency. She said that lines at food banks were the longest she has seen since the coronavirus pandemic.
“The stories were horrific,” she said.
Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania
Fetterman, who was elected in 2022, has also been voting to reopen the government, breaking with his party as he does on many other issues. He has criticized Democrats for using the shutdown to demand concessions on health care.
“I’m sorry to our military, SNAP recipients, gov workers, and Capitol Police who haven’t been paid in weeks,” he said on social media. “It should’ve never come to this. This was a failure.”
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the federal government shutdown at https://apnews.com/hub/government-shutdown.
