The Senate rejected the House's latest offer. Republicans prepare to send another non-starter. Mitch McConnell tries to buy time. 
Monday afternoon the Senate voted to reject the House’s most recent bill to keep the government open, since it would delay Obamacare by a year. Majority Leader Harry Reid will shoot John Boehner back a bill that simply keeps the lights on — a proposal Republicans didn’t even discuss in a conference meeting this afternoon.
That leaves the clock ticking down without an obvious path to avoiding a shutdown when the clock strikes midnight.
Republicans plan to vote on another bill today that would delay a rule requiring Americans to have health insurance and it would eliminate subsidies lawmakers would receive under Obamacare on their health coverage, a proposal first floated by Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana.
That option is a non-starter in the Senate and President Obama has threatened to veto any deal that touches his signature health care law, anyway.
Republicans hashed out the plan in a conference meeting in the Capitol Monday afternoon, where they did not even discuss voting on the kind of “clean” bill Reid wants.
One possible solution to the stalemate emerged earlier in the day from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office, which floated the idea of keeping the government open for a week to hash out a deal, according to several reports.
But unlike the last time McConnell stepped into a big spending fight — ultimately averting a government shutdown in 2011 — his move was swiftly rejected by both Democrats in the Senate and Republicans in the House.
Reid flatly rejected the idea, noting that the Senate’s CR was already a short term stopgap — it would fund the government for just six weeks — and more time would do little to address the gaping divide between the House and Senate.
A Democratic Senate aide told MSNBC that it was a “nonstarter” because House Republicans would likely reject it as well. Several conservative Republicans criticized the notion of a one-week CR as they emerged from a caucus meeting.
“I’m not inclined to support that, no,” Congressman Tom Price of Georgia told reporters. “It doesn’t make any progress in the right direction.”
If McConnell’s move doesn’t work, that could leave Reid and Boehner back to playing hot potato with bills to fund the government. Neither chamber wants to be holding the bag at midnight when the government runs out of money.
Boehner condemned the Senate for refusing to meet earlier than this afternoon: “The Senate decided not to work yesterday. If it’s such an emergency, where are they?”
Reid said the Senate would vote Monday on the House’s next attempt at a CR, but that the results would be the same as the last one. In general, top Democrats said it was important that they draw a line in the sand now on the shutdown fight because any weakness would invite even greater demands from the GOP when the debt ceiling came up.
“There is the thinking if you feed the beast they will be satisfied, but the opposite is true,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a member of the House Democratic leadership, told reporters at a breakfast Monday morning.
In the meantime, no one on Capitol Hill seems to know what the endgame will be.
“I have no idea what will happen,” GOP Rep. Ted Poe of Texas said on Monday morning. ”There’s been no decisions made on what happens when we get the Senate’s version back.” Outside Washington, markets are already nervous that a shutdown is on the horizon, with the Dow Jones dropping triple digits on Monday morning.
One thing seems certain, though: Regardless of whether or not there is a government shutdown after midnight, enrollment in Obamacare’s health-care exchanges will begin tomorrow, putting the centerpiece of the law into effect.
When asked how House Republicans would deal with that reality, Poe demurred. “We’ll just have to deal with that when tomorrow comes,” he said.
