Colorado’s House delegation votes on party lines to end federal government shutdown
Members of Colorado’s U.S. House delegation voted along party lines Wednesday on legislation to end the longest federal government shutdown in the nation’s history.
The state’s four Republicans — U.S. Reps. Lauren Boebert, Jeff Hurd, Jeff Crank and Gabe Evans — voted with the 222-209 majority to pass a measure that went to President Donald Trump for his signature to fund the government until Jan. 30, 2026.
Democratic U.S. Reps. Diana DeGette, Joe Neguse, Jason Crow and Brittany Pettersen voted against the bill, citing its lack of funding to extend enhanced tax credits set to expire at the end of the year that subsidize health insurance purchased under the Affordable Care Act.
Colorado’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, opposed the deal worked out over the weekend between the chamber’s Republican leaders and a group of eight moderate senators who caucus with the Democrats. The resolution passed the Senate, 60-40, with one Republican voting against it.
Evans, a freshman Republican from Fort Lupton, slammed his colleagues across the aisle for rejecting the funding legislation that first passed the House on Sept. 19 with the same partisan split.
“For 42 days, Democrats have held the American people hostage,” Evans said in a statement, criticizing the opposition for “denying pay to our troops and federal workers, while putting SNAP and other essential resources at risk.”
Evans said that House Republicans were “ending the Schumer shutdown,” blaming the Senate Democratic leader for dragging out the shutdown for more than six weeks.
DeGette, a Denver Democrat and the dean of the state delegation, said she’d been ready to approve a package to reopen the government if it fixed what she termed “the Republican health care crisis,” arguing that her constituents were facing steep increases in health insurance premiums on the state exchange.
“I am a HELL NO on this bill because it does nothing to lower health care costs while greenlighting the Trump administration’s agenda of contempt and corruption,” DeGette said in a statement.
Under the deal reached in the Senate, that chamber’s GOP leadership agreed to hold a vote on extending the enhanced tax credits by Dec. 12, though House Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this week wouldn’t commit to putting the question to a vote in his chamber.
“Colorado families deserve better than an alleged promise from Republicans who have repeatedly gone back on their word and who routinely hand Congressional authority over to a president who flaunts the law,” said Crow, an Aurora Democrat, in a statement after the vote.
“Trump and Republicans have created an affordability crisis for working Americans and refuse to come to the table to fix it,” Crow added. “I cannot support a bill that will make a bad situation worse and hand the American people a raw deal.”
Crank, a Colorado Springs Republican, laid blame for the shutdown at the feet of Democratic lawmakers.
“The Democrats owned this shutdown, and there is no denying it,” he said in a statement. “It is a shame that they chose their own partisan games over paying our troops and the federal workforce.”

