WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives is expected to vote Wednesday on legislation to reopen the federal government and end the longest shutdown in U.S. history.
Americans have been feeling the brunt of the shutdown for weeks, whether through airline issues or limited SNAP benefits. For lawmakers in Washington, this shutdown is about far more than flights and federal paychecks.
It's about the policies and priorities that have kept Congress deadlocked for weeks.
Ahead of the vote, I spoke with one of the voices from our area, the only Democrat representing the Tri-State, Greg Landsman.
He said he did not vote for the continuing resolution, which triggered the shutdown, and he does not plan to support it on Wednesday night.
His focus, Landsman said, has been on extending health care subsidies that are about to expire — something this bill does not do.
I asked him if he regretted his decision to vote against the continuing resolution because the government will likely reopen without the items he pushed for.
"I hate how all of this has played out ... but my vote was on a continuing resolution, which I didn't support," Landsman said. "So the idea was it was going to go over to the Senate. They did not have any Democratic support, and so that meant they needed to negotiate. And the assumption was they would do what they've always done, and that the president would engage like every other president, and they would negotiate a bipartisan deal and it would come back to us. And that just didn't happen."
Landsman said he understands both parties deserve blame when it comes to the length of the shutdown, but said he wasn't willing to compromise on the health care issue.
"Typically in the past, the majority party has worked with the minority to pass a budget when they need their votes, and they refused to do that," Landsman said. "And so then it put Democrats, including myself, in a bind because we've got to extend these Affordable Care Act subsidies and protect people's health care. So, yeah, I think the whole thing was avoidable. I think it has been absurd."
Sources say Democrats have secured a vote on those subsidies in the coming weeks, but there's no guarantee that vote will happen. If they expire at the end of the year, projections show 4.2 million Americans could drop coverage because premium costs are too high, according to a nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
