Washington is divided as ever with just six days to avert a government shutdown. But a growing number of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree that perhaps these regular stoppages are a pattern worth trying to break.

The federal government has shut down three times in the last decade alone, with a fourth instance seemingly inevitable. These stoppages have rarely offered significant changes in policy but have often left concrete economic damage in their wake.

The frustration has led to a surge of new interest in recent days for plans — many of which have been on the table for years now — that aim to end shutdowns entirely or at least make them much more difficult.

"What could be more reasonable than passing a bill that would prevent shutdowns?" recently asked Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who is pushing for a vote on the issue, predicting it would pass the Senate 100-0.

The plans, to be sure, remain long shot efforts. But one bill may get a prominent hearing and a vote on the Senate floor in the coming days, providing at least a glimmer of hope that there could be a path to some silver lining amid the dysfunction that has washed over Washington in recent weeks.

Here are the various options on the table:

One bill to make lawmakers 'finish your classwork during class'

The plan with the most energy at the moment is a bipartisan effort being led by Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H), called the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act of 2023.

The idea behind that bill is to avoid a shutdown by automatically keeping the government open in rolling 14-day increments if the annual spending bills don't get enacted on time.

But there is a catch.

The bill also mandates that lawmakers and relevant executive branch officials must stay in Washington and work nonstop until the bills are done. If passed, the bill would require Congress to be in session at least once every day and also revoke taxpayer-funded travel budgets.

As advocates argue, the recent 35-day shutdown that occurred from Dec. 22, 2018 until Jan. 25, 2019 might have played out very differently if the negotiators had been forced to stay in Washington on Christmas.

“The one pressure point in Congress that is the great equalizer is time,” said Lankford Thursday during an event with the Bipartisan Policy Center to promote the bill. He added that the message of the bill is akin to saying to America's leaders "if you don’t finish your classwork during class, you have to stay after and finish it."

Their idea has had a measure of momentum in the past week with not only an array of co-sponsors from each party pushing it, but the bill finding itself central in Senate negotiations as Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) searches for a way out of a blockade in his chamber.

One lawmaker pushing for a vote on the issue, Johnson, has been using procedural maneuvers in the Senate to block progress on spending legislation. He recently offered to remove his hold if the shutdown-ending measure receives a vote.

The offer still stands as lawmakers prepare to return to Washington in the coming days and the path ahead is very much up in the air with officials searching for any way to avoid a shutdown in the coming days.

Three other approaches to the issue

But the Lankford-Hassan plan enjoys far from universal support. One critic is Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who argued in a Yahoo Finance Live interview Thursday that the bill could give too much leverage to opponents of increased government spending for urgent priorities.

"I wouldn't leap on to that bill, I don't think it's a balanced presentation," he says.

Merkley, naturally, has his own ideas for how to head off future shutdowns. His sights instead are set on a change in Senate rules that would guarantee spending bills that are approved at the committee level receive a timely vote on the Senate floor.

This approach wouldn’t necessarily end a government shutdown but would remove a key bottleneck — one that Sen. Johnson is currently exploiting — that has left the Senate stuck in limbo. The upper chamber has passed all 12 of its appropriations bills out of committee but has also seen floor votes delayed because of procedural tactics.

Merkley hopes that the mounting frustration over what all sides acknowledge is a broken appropriations process could give his idea new life in the years ahead. He also notes that historically "this is the way it used to work" in the Senate based on a sense of comity, before procedural tactics were embraced.

Another plan comes from two lawmakers who represent an outsized portion of the federal employees who would be most negatively affected if another shutdown occurs.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) have a plan called the End Shutdowns Act. Their idea has some similarities with the Lankford/Hassan bill in that it would initiate automatic temporary funding at the start of a new fiscal year if a lapse is imminent and also would limit what other issues the Senate could consider until a long-term spending deal is reached.

Their plan hasn’t been as prominently on the radar this week but advocates point out that it was Kaine who pushed the idea during the 2018 shutdown. While he couldn't avert that stoppage, he objected to the Senate going out of session that year and consequently helped secure the passage of a law that is still in force that guarantees back pay to furloughed federal employees.

Yet another plan would aim for lawmaker pocketbooks. The "No Pay for Congress During Default or Shutdown Act" does exactly what the title suggests. Paychecks for lawmakers during any debt ceiling default or federal government shutdown would be withheld but then — in compliance with the 27th Amendment — would be released at the end of the congressional session.

The varied plans of course face long odds with lawmakers in the House of Representatives unable to agree on even widely popular measures like funding the Pentagon.

What advocates hope is that the dysfunction itself ends up increasing the pressure for action.

As Lankford put it this week, "One of the pressure point moments like this is when we’ve got the whole country talking, so let’s go ahead and vote on it."

Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

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