By Mary Clare Jalonick, Lisa Mascaro and Stephen Groves, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) became one of just a handful of Democrats to vote for a Republican-backed funding bill that would avert a government shutdown Tuesday evening, even as that vote failed and the nation’s first shutdown in seven years grew all but certain. 

“I voted to avoid a costly shutdown that would harm Nevadans and hand power to a reckless administration,” she told reporters moments later. “We should be working on bipartisan solutions to address a looming health care crisis, but that doesn’t mean we should be swapping harm to one group of Americans for another.”

The continuing resolution that would have funded the government through late November failed to clear the necessary 60-vote threshold, with Cortez Masto, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Sen. Angus King (I-ME) joining Republicans in voting for it. Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) joined most Democrats in voting against the measure. 

“In Nevada, I know there’s still high costs,” Cortez Masto said. “There’s an economic slowdown we're concerned about. There’s, like I said, a looming health care crisis. That’s where our focus should be.”

Asked if President Donald Trump’s threat to lay off federal workers in a shutdown affected her decision, she said it didn’t.

“No, I think that’s just ridiculous,” she said. “That just shows you how ridiculous the arguments [are] on both sides, that they’re willing to harm Americans.”

In an interview with The Nevada Independent, Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV) similarly dismissed Trump’s threat.

“He’s been mass firing people in the federal government with the government open,” he said. “It’s totally more of the same, and it's illegal and unconstitutional.” 

With a government shutdown just hours away, Democrats and Republicans angrily blamed each other as most refused to budge from their positions Tuesday, unable to find agreement or even negotiate as hundreds of thousands of federal workers stood to be furloughed or laid off.

The partisan standoff over health care and spending will almost certainly trigger the first U.S. government shutdown in almost seven years at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. To avoid it, the Senate would have had to pass a House measure that would extend federal funding for seven weeks while lawmakers finish their work on annual spending bills.

The Senate was voting on that legislation Tuesday evening after rejecting a Democratic alternative that would keep the government open and extend health care benefits that expire at the end of the year. 

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Republicans are trying to “bully” Democrats by refusing to negotiate on an extension of health care benefits and other priorities.

“It’s only the president who can do this. We know he runs the show here,” Schumer said Tuesday morning, after a bipartisan White House meeting the day before yielded little progress.

“Republicans have until midnight tonight to get serious with us,” Schumer said.

Trump and his fellow Republicans say they won’t entertain any changes to the legislation, arguing that it’s a stripped-down, “clean” bill that should be noncontroversial.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said Republicans “are not going to be held hostage" by the Democrats' demands. The GOP-led House was on a weeklong recess, unavailable for immediate votes even if the Senate did find bipartisan agreement. And far from entering into negotiations, Trump instead posted a fake, mocking video of Democrats on Monday evening after the White House meeting.

On Tuesday, Trump threatened retribution, saying a shutdown could include “cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”

In a statement to The Nevada Independent, Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) said that Republicans “are willing to let the Trump administration use the government shutdown as an excuse to continue firing thousands of hardworking federal employees, endangering every service the federal government has to offer Nevadans and all Americans. By refusing to negotiate with Democrats on the continuing resolution, they are showing they just don’t care."

Blame game escalates

While partisan stalemates over government spending are a frequent occurrence in Washington, the current impasse comes as Democrats see a rare opportunity to use their leverage to achieve policy goals and as their base voters are spoiling for a fight with Trump.

Still, Schumer said Trump and Republicans would be to blame if the government shuts down.

The last shutdown was in Trump’s first term, from December 2018 to January 2019, when he demanded that Congress give him money for his U.S.-Mexico border wall. Trump retreated after 35 days — the longest shutdown ever — amid intensifying airport delays and missed paydays for federal workers.

Democrats’ health care asks

Millions of people could face higher insurance premiums if the health care subsidies expire at the end of the year. Congress first put them in place in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, to expand coverage for low- and middle-income people who purchase health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

“In Nevada alone, health care costs could double for tens of thousands of Nevadans who rely on the [ACA] if Congress fails to extend these tax credits,” Rosen said in a statement to The Nevada Independent. “I will keep pushing to end this reckless Republican shutdown, protect Nevadans’ access to health care, and put hardworking families first.”

Democrats say they want the subsidies immediately extended. They have also demanded that Republicans reverse the Medicaid cuts that were enacted as a part of Trump’s budget bill this summer and for the White House to promise it will not move to rescind spending passed by Congress.

“We are not going to support a partisan Republican spending bill that continues to gut the health care of everyday Americans,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said.

Thune has pressed Democrats to vote for the funding bill and take up the debate on tax credits later. Some Republicans are open to extending the tax credits, but many are strongly opposed to it.

In a rare, pointed back-and-forth with Schumer on the Senate floor Tuesday morning, Thune said Republicans “are happy to fix the ACA issue” and have offered to negotiate with Democrats — if they vote to keep the government open until Nov. 21.

But Nevada Democrats are insistent the problem be addressed now.

“Republicans control the House, Senate and the White House,” Rep. Susie Lee (D-NV) wrote in a statement. “If they wanted to solve this tonight, they could.”

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has kept the House out of session until next week, making it impossible to pass anything besides the continuing resolution that senators voted down Tuesday. 

Nevada Democrats slammed him for not taking action.

“What are Democrats asking?” Horsford said. “Three things: cancel the cuts, lower the cost, save health care. Nothing more, nothing less.”

A critical, and unusual, vote for Democrats

Democrats are in an uncomfortable position for a party that has long denounced shutdowns as pointless and destructive, and it's unclear how or when it would end. But party activists and voters have argued that Democrats need to do something to stand up to Trump.

Some groups called for Schumer’s resignation in March after he and nine other Democrats voted to break a filibuster and allow a Republican-led funding bill to advance to a final vote.

Schumer said then that he voted to keep the government open because a shutdown would have made things worse as Trump’s administration was slashing government jobs. He says now that he believes things have changed, including the passage this summer of the massive GOP tax cut bill that reduced Medicaid.

Asked if he trusted Schumer to hold firm on Democrats’ demands, Horsford told The Nevada Independent that he did.

“Yes, because leader Jeffries has built the unity, something that is a difference from where we were earlier in this year,” he said. “And to be clear, they made the case that, ‘Oh, well, let's give President Trump a chance. Let's see if the Republicans in Congress are willing to work. Let's see if the courts hold him accountable.’ Well, guess what? Donald Trump doesn't care about anyone but himself, and because of that, the American people are at risk of losing their health care.”

Shutdown preparations begin

The stakes are huge for federal workers across the country as the White House told agencies last week that they should consider “a reduction in force” for many federal programs if the government shuts down. That means that workers who are not deemed essential could be fired instead of just furloughed.

Either way, most would not get paid. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated in a letter to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) on Tuesday that around 750,000 federal workers could be furloughed each day once a shutdown begins.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said some of the many federal workers in his state support a shutdown.

“What I hear from federal workers is they’ve been on a slow, shutdown firing since the beginning of this administration,” Warner said. “They want us to push back.”

Federal agencies were already preparing. On the home page of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a large pop-up ad reads: “The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people.”

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Associated Press writers Seung Min Kim, Kevin Freking, Matthew Brown, Darlene Superville and Joey Cappelletti in Washington contributed to this report.