WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump finally condescended to meet congressional leaders of both parties on Monday, including the Democrats whose votes he needs, for a showdown on ways to avoid closing much of the government at midnight on Sept. 30.
The meeting went nowhere, however, because the president refused to change a single word in the Republican-written budget measure needed to avoid a shutdown, called a continuing resolution (CR).
MAGA leaders in Congress, on Trump’s orders, refused to include Democratic demands to end prior GOP-approved massive health care cuts. The Republicans’ cuts would throw millions of people off Medicaid and cause huge insurance premium price hikes for millions more.
If a shutdown occurs, parts of the government, such as the national parks, would completely close. “Essential” workers, such as VA nurses, U.S. air traffic controllers, and corrections officers in federal prisons, would all be forced to work without pay.
Trump was finally pushed to talk with the Democrats because he needs 60 votes, including at least eight Democrats, to pass anything in the GOP-run Senate. That includes the CR. There are 53 Senate Republicans, and one, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, will vote against any and all CR plans, which he says are too expensive.
On the surface, that gives Senate Democrats leverage to force concessions from the ruling Republicans. But Trump and Vice President Vance are already trying to pin the looming shutdown on Democrats in front of the cameras of the corporate media.
“They’re going to have to do some things because their ideas are not very good ones,” the president retorted. Added Vance: “I think we’re headed into a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing” by swallowing the Republican CR without any changes.
The big fight, and the topic of the White House talks, was the Democratic demand to restore $800 billion in Medicaid cuts and to extend an ACA/Obamacare tax credit that helps millions of taxpayers buy health insurance. That credit expires at the end of this calendar year, freeing insurers to raise people’s premiums by thousands of dollars per year each.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., warned of a “looming Republican health care crisis” with “costs rocketing up and our rural hospitals…shutting down.” Murray is the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, which helps decide where taxpayer dollars are going. She said the Democrats’ alternative CR would block the immediate hits that the GOP’s plan would trigger.
It also “takes critical steps to prevent Russ Vought,” Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director, “from stealing money from cancer research or Trump deciding unilaterally he is going to cut off funding he doesn’t like,” she said.
“But I am afraid that while some of my Republican colleagues say they want to address the health care tax credits, they are quick to caveat that now is not the right time. Republican leaders said as much,” she added. For the GOP, Murray warned, “the right time” would be “never.”
Though Murray didn’t say so, “never” would play into the hands of the health insurers, top funders of the Republicans who have driven U.S. health care costs, per person, to be the highest in the world by far, and to gobble up 17% of the output of all U.S. goods and services.
A shutdown also would make a bad situation, rife with understaffing and workers doing jobs they weren’t trained for, worse, in at least one agency: The Bureau of Prisons, says a local union president at a federal prison in downstate Thomson, Ill. There will be similar cases elsewhere, though President John Zumkehr of Local 4770 didn’t get into those in a guest column in The Hill.
“Once again, we are staring down the barrel of a government shutdown,” Zumkehr wrote. “Picture trying to make rent, fill your gas tank for the 30-minute commute, or keep food on the table for your kids, all while you’re told your work is ‘essential’ but your paycheck isn’t.”
Zumkehr reminded readers of the last shutdown, of 35 days in 2018-19, also under Trump. Then, the president forced that closure to try to strongarm Congress for $8 billion to complete his racist Mexican border wall. That only made a bad situation worse at his institution, Zumkehr said months before this threat hit.
Murray argued for the Democratic CR. “Our bill will not only avoid a government shutdown” but “it would address the imminent health care crisis, preventing premiums from skyrocketing by extending healthcare tax credits before those higher premiums…are locked in and [by] reversing Republicans’ massive Medicaid cuts that will kick millions off of their insurance and shutter hospitals.
“This will show America who seriously wants to help our families afford healthcare and keep those hospitals open and who is content to let those costs skyrocket and hospitals to close.”
Trump is also using the shutdown as a pretext for an increased power grab, principally through OMB Director Vought. Acting for Trump, he issued a memorandum to federal agency heads last week anticipating the shutdown and declaring OMB would use it to fire more federal workers.
Not only that, but the firings, known in bureaucratese as “reductions in force,” would continue even after the shutdown ends, Vought added. He told the officials to submit post-shutdown memos about who else and how many should be canned for not following Trump’s dictates.
In another facet of the power grab, Trump notified the governors of Illinois and Oregon he’s sending troops to Chicago and to Portland, Ore., again on the pretext of protecting federal property—and “protecting” the armed ICE agents on the streets carrying out their kidnapping missions.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker, D-Ill., called Border Patrol troops filmed marching down Michigan Avenue in Chicago’s Loop on Monday a publicity stunt and a photo op, adding their presence was designed to intimidate.
They were also caught on video chasing a protester on a bicycle who got away as well as a reporter driving by in the Chicago suburbs. They have yet to arrive in Portland. The state and the city are suing to stop them.
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