Funding deadline looms as GOP demands and Democratic absences slow effort to lock in vote

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By Ted Barrett, Clare Foran and Ali Zaslav, CNN

Government funding is set to expire Friday and, though lawmakers have expressed confidence there won’t be a shutdown, it’s still not clear when the Senate will vote to approve a stop-gap spending measure.

The House of Representatives voted last week on a bipartisan basis to approve the measure, known as a continuing resolution or CR for short, to extend funding through March 11. Lawmakers are also working to lock in a broader full-year spending package, but have said they need more time to finish and, as a result, need a short-term funding extension to avert a shutdown at the end of the week.

Now, the Senate must pass the short-term extension before it can be sent to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law.

But Republican demands and Democratic absences have complicated the effort to lock in a final Senate vote, bringing action down to the wire as the February 18 funding deadline nears.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate will pass a continuing resolution Thursday and the government won’t shut down, despite a complicated set of circumstances that is holding up a final bipartisan agreement on when votes will take place and which amendments will be considered.

“It’s a typical CR exercise. We’ll have some amendments and then we’ll pass the CR and the government won’t shut down,” McConnell told CNN as he left the floor Thursday morning.

Senate Republican Whip John Thune of South Dakota said on Wednesday afternoon that bipartisan negotiators were closing in on an agreement over how to process a series of amendments to the funding bill. He said that Republicans want votes on amendments — at a majority threshold — dealing with vaccine mandates and preventing the federal government from funding the distribution of crack pipes, something the administration denies is happening, but that nevertheless has raised bipartisan concerns.

“There is still a path, if the Democrats are willing, to get this done,” Thune told reporters.

Thune updated reporters as he left the Capitol on Wednesday evening, saying the path forward to pass the government funding bill was still not settled as Democrats deal with several absences that could make it difficult for them, in the 50-50 Senate, to block a pair of Republican amendments that would overturn vaccine mandates.

Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona was out because his wife, former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, is sick.

Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico is still away after he had a stroke and is recovering.

And 88-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein missed votes Wednesday. Feinstein’s husband is ill, which is why she missed votes, according to a source familiar with the situation. Feinstein is not expected to return to the Senate this week.

One Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, is away also, traveling abroad.

Luján tweeted on Thursday that he is now completing his recovery in DC and said, “I’m back at work and will return to the Senate floor soon.”

Democrats are reluctant to cast those vaccine mandate votes unless they know they can defeat them. If one or both were to pass, it would change the underlying government funding bill and it would have to be sent back to the House, which is out of session, and the deadline for government funding to run out is Friday.

“If we had the votes now, I think we’d win them,” Thune said about the vaccine mandate measures.

Thune said it was possible there would be support among some Republicans to use a process called “live pairing” that would have GOP senators vote “present” on the amendments instead of “yes” and therefore lower the vote threshold Democrats would need to meet to block them. It was done once this week by GOP Sen. Mike Rounds as a gesture of bipartisanship to offset the absence of Luján on a vote on a nomination.

“It’s kind of, I think, reserved for those contingencies that are really serious — and these obviously sounds like they are — so we’ll see. We have not had a full-throated discussion about pairing just yet. I’m not sure the Democrats have necessarily made that request,” he said.

But despite the uncertainly, Thune said he did not think there would be a government shutdown.

A similar scenario played out back in December, but the standoff ended with an agreement to hold votes on an earlier stopgap bill as well as a GOP amendment to prohibit the use of federal funding for Covid-19 vaccine mandates, which ultimately failed.

McConnell on Thursday morning did not detail how negotiators would overcome a large number of absences on the Democratic side that might allow a pair of Republican anti-vaccine mandate amendments to pass. But the Senate GOP leader’s assurances that the bill would pass Thursday suggest he is confident leaders will find a way around the hurdles.

The expectation on Capitol Hill remains that neither party wants a shutdown and the extension will pass the Senate before the deadline.

The White House on Thursday said it is in “constant communication” with Capitol Hill on government funding.

“We work closely with the Senate and with Congress, in general. And that’s our path — is to avert a government shutdown,” principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday.

Pressed on whether the White House had received any assurances that a shutdown would be avoided, she said it was “clearly a priority for us to make sure that there is not a government shutdown.”

This story has been updated with additional developments Thursday.

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CNN’s Manu Raju, Lauren Fox, Betsy Klein and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.