Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Monday urged House members to begin returning to the Capitol after a more than 50-day recess as the chamber prepares to vote later this week on an agreement to end the record-long government shutdown. “Air travel has been grinding to a halt in many places, and as of Sunday, nearly half of all domestic flights, U.S. flights, were either canceled or delayed,” he said. “I’m stating the obvious to all my colleagues, Republicans and Democrats in the House, you need to b

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) on Tuesday backed off the idea of forcing votes on so-called rifle shot funding bills to pay some federal workers during the shutdown, including troops and air traffic controllers. “This piecemeal approach, where you do one-off here, one-off there to make it seem more politically palatable to somebody or less painful, that’s just the wrong way to do this,” he told reporters on the 28th day of the shutdown. “There’s just a simple way to do it — it’s to pic

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) insisted Wednesday that Republicans’ short-term government funding proposal was “partisan” because it was a continuation of the funding levels that House Democrats largely rejected in March. “It represented, at the time, an attack on veterans, an attack on housing, an attack on nutritional assistance and an attack on the health care of the American people,” he said. “The legislation that they’ve put before the House and now the Senate in a take-it-or-