(Radio Iowa) -The federal government faces a widespread shutdown at midnight tonight (Tuesday) due to a partisan impasse over spending and health care, while Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, says “Democrats are holding the Senate hostage.”

Grassley says hope is evaporating for what’s known as a clean continuing resolution, a bare-bones agreement that simply says spending will remain exactly the same for a given period of time, with nothing additional tacked on. “Republicans want to pass a clean continuing resolution to keep the government open,” Grassley says, “but Democrats are refusing to vote for it.”
That’s because Democrats, in Grassley’s words, are heeding the wishes of “radical activists in their base.” Grassley serves on the Senate Finance Committee where separate negotiations were going to be held on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies, which will expire December 31st. Those talks haven’t materialized.

“As far as I know, they haven’t begun,” Grassley says. “In fact, it was only within the last week that I have heard that Republicans are willing to sit down and discuss that.” Grassley accuses Democrats of trying to attach a wide array of partisan funding items to the national budget that would cost more than one-trillion dollars.
Grassley says, “Their proposal would also roll back the $50 billion Rural Healthcare Fund that Republicans created to help hospitals in places like Iowa and other rural parts of the United States.” Grassley says he opposes these shutdown threats, and especially actual shutdowns, as a gigantic waste of time and resources.

“It costs money to shut the government down. It costs money to open the government back up,” Grassley says. “Government is supposed to be a service to the people. You can’t service the people if the government is shut down. That’s not only for servicing, it’s also for protecting the American people.”

The federal fiscal year ends at midnight. There have been ten government shutdowns since 1980, only three in the past quarter century.