14th Bid to End Gov Shutdown Fails in Senate

"The only plan Republicans have for healthcare seems to be to eliminate it, and then to tell working people to go figure it out on their own," he said. "That's not a healthcare plan. That's cruel."

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said he was optimistic about the shutdown coming to an end soon, but he wasn’t confident that it would be by the end of this week.

He noted that Republicans have made a plethora of options available to Senate Democrats, including guaranteeing a vote on the expiring subsidies, or "whatever their Obamacare bill is," after the government reopens. When asked if he believed lawmakers were close to reaching an end, he said, "I hope close."

"But the pressures, the cross pressures that everybody's feeling, are great," Thune said. "But I think there are people who realize this has gone on long enough and that there's been enough pain inflicted on the American people, and it's time to end it. So we'll see whether that's, you know, sufficient numbers are there."

When asked if he believed that the shutdown could end this week, Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who has routinely engaged in bipartisan talks since the shutdown began, said, "I don’t know, I hope so."

"Bottom line is they can stop all this with one vote and get back into it and get back to work on a bipartisan basis," he said. "Again, that's what we're hoping."

"There's no highly brand-new thing that anybody's really talking about," she said. "It's just what's the right concoction?"

"At no point since Oct. 1 has Donald Trump agreed to sit down with Democratic leaders," Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., said. "So, he can talk all he wants about the filibuster, but until he actually puts some skin in the game and sits down and talks to us, like, that is all meaningless to me. And I honestly, like, don't care about him pontificating this stuff on social media. Like, if he's got time to tweet, he's got time to just come and talk to us."