Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is removing himself from a House fight over Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) decision to keep lawmakers at home during the government shutdown.
“I try not to give the House advice,” Thune told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday when asked whether it is a strategic mistake to keep the House on recess for more than a month, as some of Johnson’s GOP colleagues have said.
The House has not been in session since Sept. 19, when Republicans passed a short-term funding bill that Democrats refuse to accept in the Senate without concessions on healthcare. Thune, by contrast, has kept the Senate voting on the bill, with 11 failed attempts as of Monday, alongside a series of confirmation votes and passage of a defense bill two weeks ago.
“I mean, I think they did their job,” Thune added. “They passed a continuing resolution, and we need to pick it up here. As I’ve said before, the play is in the Senate.”
One day earlier, Thune agreed it was time to “start thinking about” the House returning to pass the same funding bill, except with a later expiration date. The House-passed legislation would keep the government funded through Nov. 21, but the protracted standoff with Democrats, now in its fourth week, means the date will need to be December or later to buy appropriators time to strike a spending deal.
House Democrats have painted the recess as a “vacation” for lawmakers and have spent most weeks of the shutdown with a large contingent of members in Washington, but Johnson’s decision has also irked some members of his own conference who dislike the optics of Republicans staying home while more than 2 million federal employees work without pay.
Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) has called Republicans’ extended absence “embarrassing,” openly criticizing him for refusing to swear in Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat elected in Arizona a few days after the House went on recess.
In an X post Monday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said the House should be working through its full-year funding bills until Republicans can reach a bipartisan deal with Senate Democrats.
Johnson defended his decision to keep lawmakers home at a Tuesday press conference, telling reporters that “99.5% of the House Republicans understand exactly what we’re doing” and that his chamber would take up the “next batch” of appropriations bills when the government reopens.
Of the Nov. 21 deadline, Johnson said the time lost is “becoming a very dicey prospect right now.”
The extended recess has kept Johnson’s shutdown messaging more disciplined, with fewer members available to speak to the media, and represents a bid to leave Democrats with no alternative but to accept the GOP funding bill.
It has also delayed a vote on the Epstein files, a subject of GOP divisions before the funding bill passed, though Johnson denies that is why he is keeping the House out of session.
Thune, for his part, has recalibrated his strategy several times in the face of Senate gridlock, attempting to pass, so far unsuccessfully, narrower spending bills that in other circumstances would attract broad support.
Later this week, he will bring to the floor a bill paying federal employees forced to work during the shutdown after a Pentagon funding measure failed last week.
THUNE PIVOTS TO FEDERAL WORKER PAY AS LATEST SHUTDOWN TRIAL BALLOON
Thune canceled the Columbus Day recess last week but told reporters Tuesday that he would not keep the Senate in session on weekends unless he thought it would be “productive.”
“I haven’t seen any evidence yet that it will be,” Thune said.
