September 24, 2025

Good Wednesday evening. In this edition: Democrats and Republicans hold firm on government funding positions, increasing shutdown chances.

• Plus, Kimmel, ICE, Zelensky, Carson and staff departure.

Government Funding

Republicans and Democrats are doubling down on their positions with less than a week to go before the government funding deadline, raising the prospects of a shutdown.

• Absent an agreement, which seems increasingly unlikely at this point, the government will run out of funding at midnight on Tuesday — and both sides appear to be pivoting to a messaging battle.

Democrats argue it's incumbent on Republicans to negotiate since their votes will be needed in the Senate and have proposed a slew of health care–related demands.

• "We will partner in a bipartisan way to try to find common ground in order to enact a spending bill that actually meets the needs of the American people," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told reporters at the Capitol.
  
  
• "Democrats do not support the partisan Republican spending bill because it continues to gut the health care of the American people."

Republicans say there's nothing to negotiate on a short-term funding patch and consider Democrats' expensive demands nonstarters.

• "Democrats' requests are completely unhinged, unreasonable, and unserious," Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said on social media.
  
  
• "Republicans have a clean, short-term CR to fund the government to allow for a bipartisan appropriations process to continue. It's time for Democrats to get serious."

The top Democratic leaders were set to meet with President Trump at the White House on Thursday, but the president canceled the meeting, calling their asks "unserious and ridiculous."

• "I have decided that no meeting with their Congressional Leaders could possibly be productive," he wrote in a lengthy post on social media.

Democrats pointed to the cancelation as further proof Republicans were not serious about negotiating for their votes — and said the GOP would bear the blame for a shutdown.

• "We've demanded Republicans sit down and talk with us for two months — but Donald Trump said to ignore the Democrats," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on X.
  
  
• "By refusing to meet with us, Trump is barreling America toward a government shutdown. He's not being president. And he's not up to the job."

Republicans last week proposed a "clean" continuing resolution to extend funding at existing levels through Nov. 21 while adding tens of millions of dollars for lawmakers' security.

• The House approved the measure nearly along party lines on Friday before leaving town until Oct. 1, when a shutdown will have already taken hold.
  
  
• The Senate then rejected the Republican CR as well as a Democratic alternative that was stacked with health care provisions, including an extension of the expiring Obamacare subsidies.

Rep. Jeffries insisted that Republicans' CR 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-leave-it fashion, is just a continuation of a dirty spending bill that we did not support in March."

Sen. Thune said he will call another vote on the Republican CR when the chamber returns next week.

• Sen. Schumer, who was walloped by his base for backing a CR in March, says he will hold firm and deny the votes needed unless Republicans start to negotiate.

Watch the remarks from Rep. Jeffries.

In other news…

• Jimmy Kimmel returned to his late-night show on Tuesday evening with an emotional opening monologue in which he said he understood that his comments about the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk seemed "ill-timed, or unclear, or maybe both," but that it was "never" his intention to "make light of the murder of a young man." He also criticized the Trump administration for plying pressure on his network, calling it "anti-American." "This show is not important," he said. "What's important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this."
  
  

• A shooter opened fire at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Dallas, killing one detainee and critically wounding two others before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The FBI said it was investigating the incident as an act of "targeted violence" and said the gunman left behind ammunition that bore the phrase "ANTI-ICE." No law enforcement officials were hurt in the shooting. Republicans and Democrats condemned the rise in political violence in the country and called for calmer rhetoric.
  
  

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the United Nations the world was facing "the most destructive arms race in human history" as he called on the international community to act against Russia, warning leaders their countries could be next. He said recent advancements in drones and artificial intelligence, sparked by the ongoing war, presented a unique challenge to world peace and called for international guardrails to be put in place on the technologies.
  
  

• Dr. Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and former Housing and Urban Development secretary, joined the Agriculture Department as a nutrition, health care and housing adviser, a position that will be focused on promoting the administration's "Make America Healthy Again" agenda.
  
  

• Taylor Budowich, the White House deputy chief of staff, plans to leave the administration at the end of the month to return to the private sector, Axios reported. It makes him the highest-profile staffer to leave the White House during President Trump's second term.

For your radar…

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and other world leaders deliver remarks Thursday at the United Nations General Assembly. Watch LIVE on C-SPAN starting at 10am ET.

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