Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The conversations on the floor came as Republicans demanded that Democrats yield and provide the votes to reopen the government, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., doubled down on his position that Democrats wouldn’t budge without "serious" movement on Obamacare premium subsidies.
"Donald Trump and Republicans have barreled us into a shutdown because they refuse to protect Americans' healthcare," Schumer said. "It's clear that the way out of this shutdown is to sit down and negotiate with Democrats to address the looming healthcare crisis that faces tens of millions of American families."
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., appears willing to slowly chip away at Senate Democrats through a de facto war of attrition and plans to bring House Republicans’ bill to the floor for a vote again and again.
The Senate will be out on Thursday to observe Yom Kippur but is expected to return Friday and possibly vote into the weekend on the continuing resolution (CR) that would reopen the government until Nov. 21 to give lawmakers more time to finish work on the dozen spending bills needed to fund the government.
Thune told Fox News Digital that he expected to talk to Schumer "in the next day or two."
GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN CONTINUES AS SENATE DEMS BLOCK GOP FUNDING BILL FOR 3RD TIME
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, D.C., on March 13, 2025. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
"Anything we agree to, because it's not a clean CR if the president will tear it up tomorrow," he said. "In the past, we voted for clean CRs, but the president has shown that he'll take the money back."
Among the options tossed around in the huddle were a 10-day funding extension once floated by Schumer, which he quickly shot down earlier this week, or passing the Republican plan to actually give lawmakers time to negotiate a solution to the expiring tax credits.
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said there were no high-level discussions quite yet, but that any path forward had to be "enforceable."
"The bottom line here is that I sense real concern among my Republican colleagues about what happens to the people they represent if we go off the cliff on the Affordable Care Act," he said, referring to Obamacare.
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And Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who helped facilitate the conversation, said it’d be "great" if lawmakers were able to get something figured out before the Nov. 21 deadline in the GOP’s bill, but that he and other Republicans were still pushing Democrats to support their legislation.
"It's not like there's anything that they should be objecting to with regard to what's in the existing bill," he said. "This is their hostage, and we're just telling them, 'Look, we've got support on the other side to fix the issues that you have a concern about, but it's going to take time to negotiate those through.'"
Alex Miller is a writer for Fox News Digital covering the U.S. Senate.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/first-bipartisan-shutdown-negotiations-surface-capitol-hill-after-funding-bill-blocked-again