Watch live as Congress lurches toward a midnight government shutdown

The U.S. government has just hours left before it’ll be forced to shut down. Again.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate are currently struggling to pull together enough votes to pass a bipartisan budget deal that would spike government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. And if they don’t get the votes by midnight Thursday, the government will run out of funding for the second time in a month and effectively close up shop.

The Senate, which will vote on the bill first, needs all 100 members to agree to hold a vote before midnight. This is already proving tricky, since Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is refusing to give his permission until the Senate takes 15 minutes to debate and vote on his amendment to cut funding.

“I'm not advocating for shutting down the government,” Paul, one of the chamber’s most conservative members, told Fox News. “I’m also not advocating for keeping the damn thing open and borrowing a million dollars a minute. This is reckless spending that is out of control.”

Opponents, however, argue that if the Senate allows a vote on Paul’s amendment, several other senators will also likely ask for votes on their amendments.

"He wants to offer an amendment but that requires consent and you could imagine there are other people who might like to offer amendments too and that would open it and delay our ability to get this done," Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn told the Hill.

Without Paul’s help, the earliest the Senate can begin to vote would be 1 a.m. Friday morning — an hour after the government funding expires. But even if the budget deal does get past the Senate Thursday night, the House would then also need to vote to pass the budget deal, which could take several more hours. House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, of Maryland, has already started urging lawmakers to vote on a continuing resolution to keep the government open for at least another day.

However, dozens of liberal Democrats in the House — including Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi of California — are also expected to vote no on the bill, since it doesn’t offer a fix for the thousands of people set to lose the protection of the Deferred Action for Childhood Dreamers program in March.

All this has led the Trump administration to already start preparing for the worst: The White House Office of Management and Budget is now advising government agencies “to review and prepare for lapse,” the Washington Post reported.