Democrats Want Trump Himself to Negotiate Shutdown Deal

With the failure in the Senate of both a Republican-sponsored stopgap spending bill and a Democratic-sponsored “counterproposal,” we’re now just nine days away from a government shutdown with no clear prospects for resolving the deadlock. Democrats have put several poison pills on their list of demands for supplying the votes to avoid a shutdown (notably, the cancellation of some of the Medicaid cuts recently enacted in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and an end to spending clawbacks by OMB director Russell Vought ). But their principal public complaint is that Republicans won’t even come to the bargaining table.

The Democrats’ latest maneuver has been to demand Donald Trump directly negotiate with them since his congressional vassals won’t go to the bathroom without a permission