Endgame? Midgame? It’s all fun and games until your constituents can’t get on airplanes?
Maybe readers haven’t heard about the change of plans for American airspace. Hope you didn’t plan on a weekend getaway during this stage of the Schumer Shutdown:
The Federal Aviation Administration said it was ordering traffic to be reduced by 10% at 40 major airports while air-traffic controllers work without pay during the government shutdown.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the reduction, starting on Friday, would keep air travel safe as flight delays and cancellations pile up. The shutdown, which began Oct. 1, has exacerbated staffing issues in the ranks of federal transportation employees, leading to thousands of delayed or canceled flights, and long lines at security checkpoints.
“This is about where’s the pressure and how do we alleviate the pressure,” Duffy said Wednesday at a news briefing.
The FAA said it would name the 40 locations on Thursday after briefing those affected. The agency estimates that it handles an average of 44,360 flights a day.
Let’s hope that the top three locations for reductions are Reagan International, Dulles, and Baltimore. If the Senate won’t pass a clean CR, then the senators themselves can figure out alternative ways to break for their usual long weekend. Dick Durbin can take his beloved Amtrak to Chicago, for instance. That should be fun. He can spend his two day trip talking with fellow citizens from Illinois who couldn’t get a flight to O’Hare, either. That should be even more fun.
Now that the elections are over, what’s next? Hardliners among Senate Democrats want to keep the bad times rollin’, Politico reports, but moderates have had enough. Senate Republicans have worked to put together a package that includes a longer CR plus a “minibus” of full appropriation bills along with a floor vote on ACA subsidies, but no guarantee on passage:
A turning point could be tomorrow’s high-stakes Democratic caucus lunch. Party firebrands are likely to push to hold out longer, emboldened by Tuesday’s Democratic victories across the country — and voters’ apparent repudiation of President Donald Trump.
But many Democrats feel a sense of fatigue with the standoff and its impacts on food aid and travel. Democratic senators involved in bipartisan negotiations such as Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Gary Peters (D-Mich.) celebrated their party’s electoral wins but said talks won’t be affected.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Wednesday that Republicans are close to finalizing the “minibus” that would serve as the vehicle for any CR to open the government, though obstacles remain on both sides of the aisle in terms of getting the votes to overcome procedural hurdles.
As for the CR itself, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) said House and Senate Republicans are close to settling on an end date for the extension of government funding — likely sometime in January.
Presumably, the plan would be to pass the current CR from the House, which expires on November 21. Then both chambers would have to consider the longer clean CR, along with the three full-appropriation bills. Those would cover Agriculture-FDA, Military Construction-Veterans Affairs, and Legislative Branch budgets for the rest of FY2026 separately from the clean CR. Presumably, Ag-FDA would include SNAP funding, which as I noted briefly last night, would sweeten the prospects for cutting a deal on ending the shutdown.
Would the House go along with this deal? Probably, since it really doesn’t change the status quo much at all. The full appropriation bills will take a few hostages off the table for the next game of chicken, assuming Schumer wants another round of this inside-the-Beltway crisis. Some House Republicans will balk at the vote on maintaining the current ACA subsidies, but as long as it doesn’t fund coverage for illegal aliens, those may be more popular than the GOP wants to admit at the moment.
Would Schumer take this deal? Probably not, at least not publicly. He’s too invested in Orange Man Bad Obstruction, but Schumer has to understand that there’s no point in this at all after Tuesday. This was an election strategy for Democrats, especially in firing up the base in Virginia, and it seems to have worked. What’s left to win now? Republicans are not going to repeal their One Big Beautiful Bill, no matter how long the shutdown runs. If Schumer pushes it any further, Thune might actually float a filibuster carve-out for clean CRs and use those for the next year to cut Democrats out of the budgeting process altogether until after the midterms, as ugly as that would be.
(Yes, it would be ugly, The baseline for these CRs is Joe Biden’s final budget. That’s why Mike Johnson had a tough time selling the clean CR in the first place.)
Schumer will likely allow enough Senate Democrats to flip with this package on the table to put an end to the pointless shutdown before it does real damage. It may still take the weekend snarl of air traffic to convince them. Maybe that will force enough senators to spend the weekend doing their jobs. But just in case, here’s a public service announcement: Do not pick up hitchhikers looking for a ride out of DC. They could be robbers, murderers, or even worse, your elected senator.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is still here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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