WASHINGTON A group of Senate Republicans felt confident on Thursday afternoon about their strategy to hold up a government funding bill this week to dramatize their dislike of President Joe Biden s efforts to encourage vaccination against COVID-19.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), the leader of the Senate faction that has said it will refuse to allow a quick vote on a government funding bill, said hes gotten nothing but positive feedback for his stance.

My phone has blown up and continues to blow up with the vaccine mandate issue, but not one Kansan has reached out to me to say, Dont shut the government down, Marshall told reporters Thursday.

But by Thursday evening, Marshall and his gang had folded, allowing a Senate vote on a government funding bill in exchange for a futile amendment vote against the vaccine rule. The Senate then approved a House-passed bill funding the federal government through mid-February by a bipartisan vote of 6928, meaning there will be no shutdown.

Marshall and more than a dozen other Senate Republicans pledged last month to oppose any government funding bill that doesnt defund the Occupational Safety and Health Administrations directive for firms with more than 100 employees to require vaccination or weekly testing for their workers. The new rule was set to take effect in January but has been placed on hold pending legal challenges.

Marshall claimed so many workers will refuse to be vaccinated, and therefore lose their jobs, that the rule will hurt the economy. He said the weekly testing alternative for workers who refuse shots would be almost impossible for employers to deal with.

This is about an economic shutdown, he said. Its not just about a government shutdown. I dont want to shut the government down.

The Senate needed unanimous consent in order to quickly pass a bill funding the government prior to the Friday deadline. Any senator can object, which gave Marshall and others who agree with him leverage over the process. But the Marshall faction completely backed down from its threat.

Marshall and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said they would be willing to allow quick passage of a bill funding the government if Democrats agreed to a simple majority vote on an amendment defunding the vaccine mandate on businesses, which theoretically would have had a better chance of passage. With a simple majority instead of a 60 vote threshold, there was some chance a rogue Democrat, such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), might side with Republicans to kill the mandate. But when the vote happened, every Democrat voted no.

Other Republicans also disagreed with the shutdown strategy, calling it a futile attempt to deal with an issue that may be moot already, since a pair of rulings by federal judges earlier this week have already blocked the Biden administration mandates from going into immediate effect for both federal contractors and health workers. The Biden administration has also said it wouldnt punish federal workers who refuse to comply with the mandate until next year.

It smacks of virtue-signaling when the courts have already put a stay on it and when the Biden administration isnt enforcing a vaccine mandate on federal employees, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told HuffPost, referring to the shutdown strategy. It doesnt accomplish anything besides making some people frightened who are counting on checks from the government.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the senator who single-handedly shut down the government in 2013 in a hopeless bid to defund Obamacare, said the court cases made a shutdown all the more important because they showed the mandates were illegal.