The odds of a government shutdown are rising after Democratic leaders on Tuesday swiftly rejected a 91-page stopgap funding proposal unveiled by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and fellow House Republicans because it was put together with little Democratic input and doesn’t extend generous health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Democrats voted more than a dozen times to extend federal funding with short-term “clean” continuing resolutions when former President Biden was president and they controlled the Senate, but now they’re drawing a hard line on what ordinarily would be a noncontroversial funding proposal.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) on Tuesday said the political dynamics in Washington today are very different from March, when he and nine other Senate Democrats voted for a partisan House-passed funding bill despite strong misgivings.

The New York Democrat said he had to swallow a bad Republican bill because he feared a shutdown would “give Donald Trump the keys to the city, the state and the country.”

On Tuesday, he said Democrats now would have the upper hand over President Trump if federal funding lapses, forcing departments and agencies to close.

“It’s much different now,” Schumer said. “The Republicans are in a much weaker position now than they were then.”

He argued the Medicaid spending cuts and other elements of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act are “highly unpopular.”

He said Democrats are more unified than they were earlier this year.

And he declared Trump’s “unlawful” attempts to freeze federal grants and claw back previously appropriated funding through a pocket........

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