A group of Senate conservatives will keep fighting against funding Present Joe Biden's vaccine mandates even if it takes shutting down the government over the weekend, Rep. Roger Marshall, one of the senators who is planning to block a vote on a last-minute continuing resolution, said on Newsmax Thursday.
"The battle is still on," the Kansas Republican said on Newsmax's "National Report." "We're still fighting for hardworking Americans. [Sens.] Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, others, and myself are still fighting to prevent any of these mandates, these unconstitutional federal vaccine mandates, from going through."
The group of Senate conservatives plans to object to the quick consideration of a plan to extend funding until early next year if Democrat leaders don't agree to refuse the mandate funding.
Because of Senate rules requiring unanimous consent to move the resolution through quickly, only one senator is needed to object to keep an agreement from being reached before Friday's midnight deadline.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News Thursday that the government will not be shut down and that Republicans will not move to block a stop-gap funding bill, but Marshall disagreed.
"The minority still has a few rights left up here, and one of them is this issue of unanimous consent," said Marshall, accusing the Democrats of being so "incompetent" that they failed come to an agreement that would have avoided the need for unanimous consent to be reached that would keep a government shutdown from happening.
"They could have started this timeline three or four days ago and avoided the need for unanimous consent to keep the government open," said Marshall. "But they left us this card and we're planning on playing it."
The House is set to vote on Thursday on a bill to fund federal agencies through Feb. 18, after Democrats and Republicans agreed on that date in negotiations aimed at averting a partial government shutdown beginning this weekend.
Marshall, however, said he and the other Senate Republicans are acting against the mandates in hopes of avoiding a nationwide "economic shutdown."
"This is about jobs in Kansas, in your hometown, in your home state, where 10%, 20%, 30% of the workers have not been vaccinated, nor are they going to do so with this OSHA vaccine mandate," he said. "We're going to lose those jobs. This is not about shutting the government down."
Instead, the Republicans' move is about more, such as preventing energy brownouts when workers lose their jobs because they haven't been vaccinated, the senator said
"About a third of those workers that keep those lines open are going to quit," said Marshall.
The matter is also one of national security, he said, as about 8% to 10% of the active-duty members of the military remain unvaccinated.
"About 92% of Americans have some type of protection against COVID already," said Marshall. "I encouraged the vaccine, encouraged the booster, but I'm against mandates. What I'm hearing from my folks here is the battle is still on."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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