The United States Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer (D-NY), talks to journalists, since Senate Democratic leaders celebrate a press conference after their weekly policy lunch in Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, USA, September 9, 2025.
Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters
Congress Democrats are concentrating on medical care as a key conflict point in negotiations with the threat of a closing of the avecine government.
The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, and the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York, have said that they will not support the legislation backed by the Republican Party to keep the government financed unless it includes certain provisions of medical care, establishing a bitter fight against Republican legislators that could activate a closure.
“We have made it clear that under no circumstances will we support a project of partisan republican spending law that continues to start the medical attention of the American people,” Jeffries said on the floor of the camera this week.
With funds on the edge, the Democrats of Congress require that any legislation that avoids a closure includes an extension of the tax credits of the Law of Low Price Health Care, which will expire at the end of this year unless Congress intervenes.
If fiscal credits disappear, average premiums could be shot at approximately 75%, according to KFF, a non -partisan health policy research group.
The vast majority of Americans with a health plan in the ACA market had a premium tax credit in 2025, according to KFF, which means that its elimination would have generalized consequences.
The Democrats have also repeatedly criticized the cuts to Medicaid that were part of the “a great project of beautiful law”, and they want the Republicans to reinvey them.
With the Democrats who seem firm, their new hard line will complicate the negotiations before September 30, which is when government financing will currently expire.
A Republican Conference of the Unified Chamber could approve legislation without democratic support, but the Senate Republicans need some democratic support, given its thin majority.
In March, Schumer joined Republicans to avoid a government closure, but his movement caused strong criticism of his party.
This time, with one eye in the mid -period elections 2026, Schumer and his Democratic colleagues have indicated that they will not support government financing legislation that does not include key concessions.
But Republicans, on the other hand, also seem unlikely to weaken the requests of Democratic legislators.
President Donald Trump dismissed the demands of the Democrats, telling Fox News this week that “there is something wrong with them.”
“If you gave them all the dreams at this time … they want to give money to this or that and destroy the country. If you give them every dream, they would not vote for it,” Trump said in “Fox and his friends.”
The leader of the majority of the Senate, John Thune, RS.D., also accused the “clamor” Democrats for a government closure.
“They want a fight with the Trump administration,” Thune told PunchBowl News “Fly Out Day.”
“But they don't have a good reason to do it. And I don't intend to give them a good reason to do it,” he continued.
With the operating time, legislators are likely to follow a stop measure to maintain stable funds in federal agencies.
But even reaching that temporary solution will be a uphill battle.
