Senate fails to advance GOP funding bill for 13th time
- The Senate failed to advance a Republican-backed funding bill to end the government shutdown for the 13th time. The final vote was 54 to 45, falling short of the 60 votes needed to move forward. No new Democrats voted in favor of advancing.
- After lunch with Senate Republicans at the Capitol, Vice President JD Vance said the Trump administration has found a way to pay members of the military this Friday, but did not provide details.
- Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia filed suit against the Trump administration over its plans to withhold food aid under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, arguing the law requires the government to provide funds for November. Benefits for 42 million Americans are due to run out on Saturday without more funding.
Thune says passing individual bills to pay workers, fund programs is “wrong way to do this”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune seemed ambivalent about bringing up individual bills to pay certain groups of federal workers or fund programs like SNAP during the shutdown.
“This piecemeal approach, where you do one-off here, one-off there to make it seem more politically palatable to somebody or less painful, that’s just the wrong way to do this,” Thune said.
He said the simple way to resolve the issue is to approve the House-passed measure to fund the government until Nov. 21.
“I’m open to suggestions, obviously, and we’ve had people throw out different ideas about when we ought to be here and we shouldn’t be here, but it doesn’t seem like it makes a lot of sense to just repetitively now go down and have the Democrats vote over and over again against opening government,” Thune said.