'No idea' how the government shutdown might end, House speaker says as Senate rejects funding bill for the 10th time

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Thursday that he has “no idea” how the government shutdown will end as the standoff drags on through its third week.

“Many of you have asked all of us, ‘How does it end?’ We have no idea,” Johnson said during a press conference Thursday morning in which he blamed Democrats for refusing to vote for a plan to reopen the government.

“It’s up to the Democrats, and they have to decide it,” he added. “Democrats appear perfectly happy to keep the political theater going while real people suffer.”

It is true that Democrats have not budged from the stance that they’ve held since before the government ran out of funding on Oct. 1, which is that they will only allow a budget to get through the Senate if it includes some of their policy priorities. But Johnson and his fellow Republicans have been equally unyielding.

Johnson has kept the House out of session for weeks, insisting that there is no reason for the chamber to meet because it already “did its job” by passing a short-term funding bill in mid-September. That bill, which would allow the government to reopen until late next month, was brought up for a vote in the Senate for the 10th time on Thursday. Democrats blocked it from moving forward, as they had in each of the previous votes over the past three weeks.

“Democrats are holding the line to save healthcare as extreme MAGA Republicans double down on their efforts to rip it away from millions of Americans,” Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote on social media Tuesday.

Earlier this week, Johnson warned that the country was “barreling toward” one of the longest shutdowns in history. That’s already the case. Thursday marks the 16th day since government funding ran out, which makes it the fourth-longest shutdown ever. It will become the second-longest by the middle of next week if it’s not resolved. The longest shutdown ever lasted 34 days during President Trump’s first term.

Though there are several areas of disagreement between the parties, the key sticking point that is holding back a deal centers around the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Subsidies that have made health care plans through Obamacare more affordable for years are set to expire in January, causing premiums to spike dramatically. Democrats want those subsidies extended as part of any bill to reopen the government. Republicans say they are willing to discuss the subsidies, but only after the shutdown has ended.

Another major factor that could be prolonging the shutdown is Trump. The president has seized on the stalemate as an opportunity to punish his political rivals and to further reshape the federal government. He has canceled billions of dollars in federal funding for projects across the country, mostly concentrated in blue states. He has also fired thousands of government workers and threatened to axe “democratic programs” throughout the government. The legality of each of those moves has been challenged on the grounds that Congress, not the president, has control over government spending. On Wednesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump from carrying out his plans for mass layoffs.

Democrats have also argued that Trump went outside of his legal authority by reallocating funds to ensure that members of the military continue to get paid during the shutdown and to keep a special food assistance program for low-income mothers and their children from running out of money. While those actions offer relief to millions of Americans, they also alleviate some of the pressure that could have created added urgency for Congress to end the shutdown.

The president’s willingness to defy Congress’s traditional “power of the purse” has also fueled Democrats’ hesitancy to make a deal to reopen the government. Some members of the party have asserted that any bill to reopen the government must include provisions to prevent Trump from overriding congressionally approved budgets whenever he wants.

“He is unchecked at this point,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur told Politico on the day before the shutdown began. “We have to check him. No one should have that kind of power.”