Senate Republican predicts Democrats will shut down government ‘right before the midterms’

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) predicted on the Senate floor that his Democratic colleagues will find a reason to block funding legislation and trigger another government shutdown “right before the midterms” to sow chaos in Washington before Election Day.

“I think my Democratic friends are going to shut down the government right before the midterms,” Kennedy said on the floor Wednesday.

“I hope I’m wrong and if I am — please make me wrong — I will come to this floor and apologize,” Kennedy said to his Democratic colleagues during a speech shortly before senators held a marathon session of votes to pass a budget resolution.

Kennedy made the comments while expressing his desire to offer an amendment to the budget resolution to instruct the Homeland Security Committee to add to the upcoming budget reconciliation package legislation to either automatically implement government stopgap spending measures in case of a funding lapse or to pay essential federal workers during a shutdown.

He explained on the Senate floor that his amendment would instruct the Homeland Security panel to take Sen. James Lankford’s (R-Okla.) Prevent Government Shutdowns Act, which would automatically implement two-week funding stopgaps if Congress can’t agree on annual funding legislation, and Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) Shutdown Fairness Act, which would pay essential federal workers during a shutdown, and add them to the reconciliation package.

Kennedy said he wants to “marry those bills so we’ll be ready in case anybody tries to do a shutdown on us.”

He is one of a growing number of GOP senators who thinks another government shutdown is likely when federal funding expires at the end of September.

Kennedy pointed out earlier in the week that Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) faced a furious backlash from his party’s base when he voted with Republicans in March last year for a House-passed government funding measure to avoid a shutdown.

“Schumer did the right thing for the country last March and helped us get out of a shutdown. You saw what happened. Schumer’s not Bambi’s baby brother. He did that once, he touched the stove, got burned. He was never going to do it again,” Kennedy told reporters Monday.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) predicted on Tuesday that Schumer would shut down the government again on Sept. 30, about a month before Election Day.

“On Sept. 30, funding for the federal government will end. Chuck Schumer is not a creative guy, he’s not hard to predict. Last year, right before the election, what did Schumer do? He shut the whole government down, and the Democrats believe that shutdown helped them politically, and it benefited them in New Jersey and Virginia,” Cruz said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“I will wager, right now, $100, that Schumer intends — on Oct. 1 — to do the same thing, to shut the whole federal government down for a month, so that on Election Day … the government is shut down, you have four-hour lines again in airports, and the Democrats can say, ‘See, the Republicans are in charge, they don’t know what they’re doing,’” Cruz predicted.

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