President Trump and congressional lawmakers barreled toward a government shutdown on Tuesday, digging in for what could be a prolonged standoff as the two sides traded accusations and barbs rather than engage in negotiations.
The Senate on Tuesday evening again voted down a Democratic bill to avert a shutdown by funding the government through October. That plan would also extend expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits. The vote was 47-53, falling well short of the 60 votes needed. A second vote on a Republican plan to fund the government through November 21, without an extension of the ACA subsidies, also failed, 55-45.
With little sign that their deep differences could be resolved by a midnight deadline, Democrats and Republicans spent much of the day attacking each other and assigning blame.
For his part, President Trump warned Democrats that his administration and budget director Russell Vought would look to use a shutdown to further their agenda. “We’re doing well as a country, so the last thing we want to do is shut it down, but a lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” he said. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
Earlier in the day, he threatened large-scale cuts. “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like,” the president told reporters.
The administration has significant discretion to decide what federal operations will continue and which will be suspended, and it has already begun detailing its plans. An estimated 750,000 federal workers could be sent home without pay, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Vought has also threatened mass firings of federal workers who are not deemed essential, rather than just the usual furloughs, if the government shuts down. The website of the Department of Housing and Urban Development featured a large pop-up box that said: “The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people.”
Fake video, fake claims: Trump took the blame game to a whole new level on Monday night, posting a racist, AI-generated video on social media. The 34-second clip depicts House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a sombrero and a large mustache while mariachi music plays in the background. Next to him, a fake Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says that Black and Latino voters don’t like Democrats anymore and “if we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”
Democrats slammed Trump for the video. “Bigotry will get you nowhere,” Jeffries wrote on social media. “Cancel the Cuts. Lower the Cost. Save Healthcare. We are NOT backing down.”
In keeping with the fake video he posted, Trump on Tuesday again made the misleading argument that Democrats are trying to give “illegal aliens” free healthcare. Other Republicans have also made such claims, even though undocumented immigrants are ineligible for Medicaid.
“Republicans may be referring to the law changing the eligibility requirements for certain immigrant groups,” Linda Qiu explained in a New York Times fact-check yesterday. “Under the tax cut and domestic policy law, certain groups of ‘lawfully present’ immigrants are no longer eligible for Obamacare subsidies. The Democrats’ proposal would restore that eligibility.”
Qiu noted that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 1.2 million people would lose subsidies and health coverage under tighter eligibility criteria, though it did not characterize those immigrants as illegal or unauthorized.
In remarks on the Senate floor, Schumer pushed back on what he called Republican lies. “They say the Democrats want undocumented immigrants to get the federal dollars of healthcare. That is utter bull, and they know it,” he said. “The law prohibits undocumented immigrants from getting payments from Medicare, Medicaid, or the ACA. There is no money – not a penny of federal dollars – that are going there. So why do they bring this up? Because they're afraid to talk about the real issue, which is healthcare for American citizens, healthcare for people who need the healthcare and can't afford these premiums.”