JD Vance is heading to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for lunch with Senate Republicans. The White House says the vice president is swinging by to talk tariffs, but it’ll be tough to divert the discussion away from the shutdown.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said as much Monday, telling POLITICO he fully expects to hear Vance’s “assessment of where things stand on government funding” alongside “any other range of subjects.”
GOP senators could be anxious to hear from an administration emissary, with President Donald Trump on an overseas trip as the shutdown barrels into its fifth week. Rank-and-file Republicans are split over whether to take action to ease certain pain points or allow conditions to deteriorate so Democrats will feel maximum pressure to vote on the House-passed stopgap.
GOP leaders will hear out different factions within the conference during Tuesday’s lunch before deciding whether to allow votes on so-called “rifle-shot” bills that would allow funding to flow to certain government programs even as the shutdown affects operations elsewhere.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has legislation that would pay air traffic controllers and TSA agents for the duration of the funding lapse, while Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has a measure that would prevent millions from losing food aid when the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is due to run out of money Saturday.
But Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) said Monday there’s “not a lot” of appetite among Republicans to hold standalone votes on piecemeal bills, citing a prevailing desire within the GOP to punish Democrats for their shutdown stance.
Another potential Tuesday lunch topic: GOP appropriators want to discuss moving full-year government funding bills once the shutdown ends. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) told POLITICO that includes whether the White House would respect bipartisan spending negotiations or continue to claw back congressionally-approved funding.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats will huddle in their own closed-door lunch Tuesday for their first caucus-wide gathering since the American Federation of Government Employees — the largest federal employee union — on Monday called for the party to stand down and pass the “clean” continuing resolution.
Democratic leaders didn’t immediately signal plans to surrender. And plenty of Democrats said they intend to hold firm until Republicans come to the table to negotiate a bipartisan compromise to reopen the government.
“The AFGE would not want us to cut a deal and then have Trump fire a bunch of people next week,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told reporters. “If we cut a deal and then he did that, they would come to us and say, ‘What the hell were you guys thinking?’”
Still, AFGE’s unequivocal statement pushed Democrats into a defensive crouch for perhaps the first time since the shutdown began, while exposing some major fault lines inside the party.
“It has a lot of impact,” Democratic Whip Sen. Dick Durbin said of the union’s statement. “They’ve been our friends.”
What else we’re watching:
— Will Illinois enter the redistricting fight? House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told Black leaders in a meeting in Chicago on Monday that a redistricting effort in Illinois is essential to counter GOP moves to redraw maps in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri. It comes as House Democrats broadly are amping up their redistricting efforts in not just Illinois but Virginia and New York, too, as Trump eyes ways to capture up to 19 new GOP seats for the 2026 election cycle. But Democrats’ plans in Illinois won’t come without pushback from Black leaders.
Jordain Carney, Nicholas Wu and Shia Kapos contributed to this report.
