From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Hundreds of thousands of government workers are now expected to go on furlough as Congress fails to pass a funding bill,

leading to a government shutdown early Wednesday morning. Who's to blame? Who will voters blame? And what are the

policy stakes in the debate over government health care programs and Obamacare subsidies in

particular? Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal. We are joined today by my

colleagues, editorial board member Kate Batchelder, O'Dell, and columnist Alicia Finley.

The fourth government shutdown in about a dozen years officially began in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

After a bill to extend current government funding levels failed in the Senate on Tuesday night,

a vote of 55 to 45 short of the needed 60 votes.

Three Democrats notably voting yes with Republicans, Maine's Angus King, Nevada's Catherine

Cortez-Mastow, and Pennsylvania's John Fetterman. Angus King then explaining in a video,

here he said,

the irony, the paradox is by shutting the government who are actually giving Donald Trump more power, unquote.

The two sides are now jockeying here on Wednesday morning about the potential paths forward.

Let's start with the Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune.

Chuck Schumer at the

behest of a bunch of liberal, far-left activist groups has walked his Democrat colleagues into a

boxed canyon. There's no way out, folks. There's no way out. This could have been avoided. It's totally unavoidable.

And everybody's now asking the question, how does this end? Well, it ends when the Senate Democrats pick this bill up, passed by the House of Representatives, and vote for it.

And here on the Senate floor this morning is Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

It's clear that the way out of this shutdown is to sit down and negotiate with Democrats to

address the looming health care crisis that faces tens of millions of American families. Democrats

...