Washington (AP) – US government shut down, Donald Trump They were calling on Democrats and Republicans to work together to get out of the chaos.
“You need to take people to the room and you just have to make a deal for the benefit of the country,” Trump said.
The year was 2013and Trump was a business mogul who hadn’t yet entered politics. Now that he’s president, Trump and his fellow Republicans are taking a surprising different attitude and are refusing to negotiate with Democrats. shutdown That the GOP was incited by the minority parties.
Last year, New York Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer criticized the ideologue, who believed that “provoking a shutdown is somehow a good thing if they get what they want.” Now Schumer and most other Democrats are rejecting bills that will be made publicly available to the government and funded as they want. Includes health care regulations.
If you’ve been to Washington long enough, you probably insisted on both sides of the shutdown. The parties will use the threat of closure to enforce policy outcomes, and both parties will I criticized the other To do the same thing. No one likes to shut down, but each side claims that Americans are on their side – whether their side supports shutdown.
“Everyone makes the mistake of believing in the righteousness of their position, and it blinds them to the reality of a shutdown,” said Brendan Buck, who served as the top aide for John Boehner at R-Ohio. “It’s a political message exercise framed as a negotiation tactic, but there’s little evidence that it really serves the purpose of policy making. It’s just a platform to talk about what’s important to you.”
Other politicians do that too
Many politicians save a few moderates who are constantly worn out by closed operations and are unimmune.
Vice President JD Vance was a Senator last year, and when Congress once again lapsed funds, he filed a assertive lawsuit. Use government funds as leverage To get what Republicans wanted.
“Why shouldn’t we force this government shutdown fight and get something out of good for the American people?” Vance asked in a September 2024 podcast interview. “If it’s not a working government, why do we have a government?”
Vance is currently taking a rather different approach. Standing with the GOP leader at the White House this week, he said it was “not reasonable” for Democrats to use the proposal “as leverage, we’ll shut down government unless we give everything you want.”
In 2013, when Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren fell into Senate term, she argued in a floor speech that “the bare minimum we can do” was to pass a short-term funding bill “to open the door and keep the lights on.”
Now, Warren has voted twice for the suspension measures pushed by the GOP lawmakers and the White House.
“Democrats are at the negotiation table. We don’t have a long list of requests. I’m not saying we need to find more money,” Warren wrote on social media site X.
What drives the discussion?
What changes from each shutdown scenario is the specific policy that the agitator is seeking for.
In the fall of 2013, Republicans led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and a House conservative Republican, asserted that the government’s funding bill was necessary to strip the money. Affordable care methods And they led the country to a 16-day shutdown. In January 2018, it was Democrats who claimed that the government spending bill would provide legal protection to young people who were illegally taken to the US as children by families. Trump refused to negotiate and the shutdown ended three days later.
Later in Trump’s first term, he demanded money from the US Mexican border wall that lawmakers wouldn’t approve. Trump said he was “the one who’s going to close it,” as he had the Capitol leaders on the charge of the closure. That partial shutdown lasted for 35 days.
Does even force a shutdown work?
One common theme is that parties that force a shutdown get little of what they want.
Obama-era Health Laws were not refunded, Democrats just voted Protecting the Dreamer And Trump had to declare a national emergency to get money for his border wall. If the past is a prologue, it suggests that Democrats won’t get what they want: an inversion of Medicaid cuts introduced earlier this year through the GOP’s Signature Tax Act, in addition to an extension of healthcare subsidies for those who purchase plans through “Obamacare.”
Michael Thorning, who worked for former Senator Tom Wodall (DN.M.), said he believes the closure is happening more frequently as both Democrats and Republicans concluded that they “we don’t intend to punish them with public opinion.”
“It’s difficult to see a pattern of public accountability there,” said Sonning, now director of the Structural Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “I think it probably reduced the risk of what was considered a pretty hardball tactic.”
Two years ago, Democrat Joe Biden was president, but Trump posted to the true society that Republican fears that he was being blamed for the closure is exaggerated.
“I’m wrong!!! Anyone will be criticized by the president,” he wrote.
The White House press did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Trump’s previous shutdown-related comments. Their general press line sent an automatic message saying, “As a result of the Democratic closure, this press inbox could result in delays.”
Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson then replied, “Chuck Schumer and Democrats are eager to divert from their decision to shut down the government, so they’re writing the AP in a week’s Instagram post.” She was referring to a post from Schumer’s account that featured Trump’s comments from 2013.
“Here’s the truth, because Democrats want free health care for illegal foreigners, so they shut down the government and know that it hurts the people of America,” Jackson said. “Listen to your statement.”
