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Tag: government shutdown
Former President Trump, left, watches Sen. Mitch McConnell speak in 2019.

'Primary McConnell!' Angry Trump Demands Revenge On Senate GOP Leader

Days after talking up House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and the ultra-right lawmakers pulling his strings, former President Donald Trump called on Republicans to primary Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and any Senate Republicans who vote with him.

In a Monday post to Truth Social, a barely moderated Twitter clone for his extremist cult, the ex-president congratulated McCarthy on clinching the gavel — for which he has since taken credit — and laid into McConnell and other GOP Senators who voted to pass the $1.7 omnibus spending package late December in time to avert a partial government shutdown.

Central to Trump’s fury over the package’s passage is that it happened just before the GOP-controlled House of the 118th Congress convened, barring the GOP caucus, which would later strongarm veto power over McCarthy’s speakership, netting President Biden and the Democrats a political victory.

“We must now stop Mitch McConnell,” Trump wrote, the latest in the fusillade of attacks he has directed at the Minority Leader, who criticized him for provoking a mob of his supporters into storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to overturn the official certification of his loss.

“It’s as though he just doesn’t care anymore, he pushes through anything the Democrats want. The $1.7 TRILLION quickly approved Bill of the week before was HORRIBLE,” Trump said in his Truth Social post. “Zero for USA Border Security. If he waited just ten days, the now ‘United Republican Congress’ could have made it MUCH BETTER, or KILLED IT.”

Trump added, “Something is wrong with McConnell, and those Republican Senators that Vote with him. PRIMARY THEM ALL!!!”

The sprawling package comprised increased funding for the military; additional Ukraine aid; increased spending for college access, childcare, disaster aid, protections for pregnant workers, and more: a provision to repeal the 1887 Electoral Count Act, the 135-year old law that Trump and his attorneys tried to exploit to overturn Biden’s 2020 election triumph.

Eighteen GOP Senators — and later, nine House Republicans — some of whom are vocal critics of their counterparts across the aisle, voted with Democrats to pass the package, rebuffing a cascade of threats from prominent entities within the Republican Party.

Hours before the Senate passed the package, Trump attacked supposed “radical Democrats” for “[ramming] through this monstrosity in the dark of night” and accused McConnell of being “more of a Democrat than a Republican.”

In Monday’s Truth Social rant, Trump again referred to Elaine Chao, McConnell’s wife and his former transportation secretary, as “Coco Chow,” a racial slur.

"[Trump] is trying to get a rise out of us. He says all sorts of outrageous things, and I don't make a point of answering any one of them," Chao, who was born in Taiwan, said in December, according to Newsweek.

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House Approves Ukraine Aid, Russia Oil Ban, Averts Federal Shutdown

House Approves Ukraine Aid, Russia Oil Ban, Averts Federal Shutdown

By Richard Cowan and Makini Brice

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted to rush $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine as it battles invading Russian forces, along with $1.5 trillion to keep U.S. government programs operating through Sept. 30 and avoid agency shutdowns this weekend.

The House approved the wide-ranging appropriations in bipartisan votes, sending the legislation to the Senate which aims to act by a midnight Friday deadline when existing U.S. government funds expire.

The aid for Ukraine is intended to help bolster its military as it battles Russian forces and provide humanitarian assistance to citizens, including an estimated 1.5 million refugees already seeking safety abroad.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated that the $13.6 billion is likely to be just the tip of a much broader aid effort.

"All of us will have to do more" to help Ukraine in coming weeks or months and over the long-term to help it rebuild, Pelosi told reporters at her weekly news conference.

She was mainly referring to the United States and its NATO allies.

The House also passed legislation, by a vote of 414-17 to ban U.S. imports of Russian oil and other energy in response to its attack on Ukraine. Fifteen Republicans and two Democrats opposed the measure.

Passage of the bill came one day after President Joe Biden used his executive powers to impose such a ban. The House measure put lawmakers on record as firmly supporting the U.S. trade ban. It also calls for reviewing Russia's participation in some international trade programs, such as the World Trade Organization.

Lawmakers abandoned an effort to attach language revoking Russia's permanent normal trade relations status, which would have allowed the United States to raise tariffs on Russian imports above levels afforded all WTO members.

The U.S. government funding bill passed following a revolt from Pelosi's own Democrats who objected to a $15.6 billion COVID-19 aid initiative because of the way it would have parceled out money to individual states. The money was to be used for research and to stockpile vaccines for possible future spikes in COVID-19 infections.

Following hours of delay, Pelosi had the provision deleted to clear the way for quick passage of the Ukraine money and the "omnibus" $1.5 trillion in federal funding.

Democrats hope to revisit the COVID aid next week in separate legislation.

'Desperate Hour'

The huge government spending bill is the first to reflect Democrats' spending priorities under President Joe Biden, following four years of the Trump administration.

House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro said it increases non-defense domestic spending by 6.7% over last year, the largest rise in four years.

The Ukraine aid package, DeLauro said, would "help the Ukrainian people in their most desperate hour of need."

Republicans also applauded the measure - a rare display of bipartisanship in the deeply divided Congress.

"We must get this bill to the president's desk as soon as possible to respond to these acts of aggression," said Ken Calvert, the top Republican on the defense subcommittee of the appropriations panel.

He was referring to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and specifically the bombing of a hospital earlier on Wednesday. Failure, he added, "would undoubtedly demonstrate weakness on a global scale."

With money for the federal government due to run out at midnight on Friday, the Democratic-controlled House also unanimously approved a separate measure to keep the government funded through Tuesday.

This was seen mainly as a housekeeping step so that congressional clerks would have enough time to process the sprawling omnibus bill following House and Senate passage. That clerical work could extend beyond the midnight Friday deadline.

Acting White House budget director Shalanda Young urged Congress to promptly approve the Ukraine aid and government funding measure and send it to Biden for signing into law.

"The bipartisan funding bill is proof that both parties can come together to deliver for the American people and advance critical national priorities," Young said in a statement.

The omnibus spending plan will boost funding for domestic priorities, including money for infrastructure passed under an earlier bipartisan measure to revamp U.S. roads, bridges and broadband internet.

The plan includes $730 billion in non-defense funding and $782 billion for the U.S. military.

Amid fears that Russia and other "bad actors" could wage cyber attacks against U.S. infrastructure, the government funding bill increases the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency budget by $568.7 million for a total of $2.6 billion for this fiscal year.

In its continuing attempt to unravel the Trump administration's "Remain in Mexico" immigration policy, the bill provided no additional money for immigration hearing facilities that support the program, which forced tens of thousands of migrants to wait in Mexico pending resolution of their U.S. asylum cases.

(Reporting by David Morgan, Makini Brice, Richard Cowan and Susan Heavey, additional reporting by Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Scott Malone, Doina Chiacu, Jonathan Oatis and Bernard Orr)

Congress Averts Government Shutdown One Day Before Deadline

Congress Averts Government Shutdown One Day Before Deadline

Washington (AFP) - The US Congress approved a stopgap funding bill Thursday in a rare show of cross-party unity to keep federal agencies running into 2022 and avert a costly holiday season government shutdown.

With the clock ticking down to the 11:59 pm Friday deadline, the Senate voted by 69 to 28 to keep the lights on until February 18 with a resolution that had already advanced from the House.

The "continuing resolution" avoids millions of public workers being sent home unpaid with Christmas approaching, as parks, museums and other federal properties and services closed.

"I am glad that, in the end, cooler heads prevailed -- the government will stay open," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.

"And I thank the members of this chamber for walking us back from the brink of an avoidable, needless and costly shutdown."

Congress watchers had expected to see the resolution getting a rough ride in the Senate, where a small group of hardline Republicans threatened to tank the measure in protest over the White House's pandemic response.

But Democrats agreed to allow a straight majority vote on defunding President Joe Biden's vaccine-or-testing mandate for large companies, which promptly failed as expected.

The right-wing Republican group, led by Utah's senior senator Mike Lee, argues that the mandate is an assault on personal liberty.

780,000 Dead

The pandemic has killed more than 780,000 people in the United States and the troubling new Omicron variant of the coronavirus has raised fears of a winter surge in cases.

But legal challenges have mounted against Biden's edict requiring vaccination or weekly tests for some sections of the US workforce, including companies with more than 100 employees.

Lee had campaigned to remove federal funding to implement the mandate and was backed by right wingers in both chambers.

"If the choice is between temporarily suspending non-essential functions on the one hand and, on the other hand, standing idle as up to 45 million Americans lose their jobs, their livelihoods, and their ability to work, I'll stand with American workers every time," he said.

The figure Lee cited would represent more than a quarter of the 157 million people that make up the US workforce, according to the Pew Research Center.

Only five percent of unvaccinated adults say they have left a job due to a vaccine mandate, according to an October survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In the evenly divided upper chamber, any single senator can torpedo any vote.

But the majority of Senate Republicans -- including their leader Mitch McConnell -- were against the move, fearing they would be blamed for a shutdown.

Ahead of the House vote McConnell had indicated that Republicans would support the continuing resolution, although he gave no indication that he bring Lee and the other hold-outs to heel.

Deadlocked

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, earlier hit out at Lee and his backers, accusing them of "defiance of science and public health."

If Congress had failed to keep the government open, the closures would have begun just after midnight on Saturday and would likely have bled into the following week.

There has never been a shutdown during a national emergency such as the pandemic, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the 2018-19 stoppage wiped $11 billion from the economy.

The stopgap measure buys legislators time to negotiate full-year spending bills for the rest of fiscal 2022.

And with the threat of a shutdown off the table, Democratic leadership is now free to focus on passing Biden's domestic agenda -- a $1.8 trillion social welfare and climate spending plan.

The bill is central to Biden's legacy, but risks failing because of feuding between the Democrats' progressive and centrist factions.

Lawmakers are also deadlocked over the prospect of a first-ever US debt default that would erase an estimated six million jobs and wipe out $15 trillion of household wealth, tanking the economy.

The government is likely to run out of cash on or soon after December 15, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned, unless Congress raises the federal borrowing cap.

But Republicans say they won't help, despite having pressed for hikes under former president Donald Trump, because they want no part in the Democrats' historically large package of social reforms.

Senate Republicans Vote To Shut Government And Crash Economy

Senate Republicans Vote To Shut Government And Crash Economy

A report released by Moody's Analytics on September 21 warns that failure to raise the ceiling on the U.S. national debt and to renew the spending authority of the U.S. Treasury when it expires on September 30 will lead to a default that "would be a catastrophic blow to the nascent economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic."

Senate Republicans on Monday night blocked the bill that would fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, bringing the United States to the brink of both a government shutdown and an economic recession.

Not a single Republican voted to advance the funding bill, which had passed the House a week ago and would prevent the government from shutting down at the end of Thursday, when the current funding bill expires.

The country will reach the ceiling on its ability to borrow to pay its debts in early October. If it isn't raised, the country will default, sending it into an economic tailspin that Moody's said would cost 6 million jobs and $15 trillion in household wealth.

The report said that a default would particularly hurt the U.S. bond market, generally considered a relatively safe place to invest for retirement.

Treasury bonds are basically loans to the government made by investors that are paid back by a specified date; a default would mean the loans are not repaid on time. "Americans would pay for this default for generations, as global investors would rightly believe that the federal government's finances have been politicized and that a time may come when they would not be paid what they are owed when owed it. To compensate for this risk, they will demand higher interest rates on the Treasury bonds they purchase. That will exacerbate our daunting long-term fiscal challenges and be a lasting corrosive on the economy, significantly diminishing it."

The report said a potential default would be "cataclysmic":

Stock prices would be cut almost in one-third at the worst of the selloff, wiping out $15 trillion in household wealth. Treasury yields, mortgage rates, and other consumer and corporate borrowing rates spike, at least until the debt limit is resolved and Treasury payments resume. Even then, rates never fall back to where they were previously. Since U.S. Treasury securities no longer would be risk free, future generations of Americans would pay a steep economic price.

Democrats slammed their GOP colleagues, with Rep. Adam Schiff of California calling their refusal to close debate on the legislation and move to a vote on it before the deadline "craven."

"Every single McConnell Republican just voted to blow up the entire economy and start a depression for no reason except because the President is a Democrat," Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) tweeted.

"Mitch McConnell just 2 years ago: 'America can't default. That would be a disaster.' Now he's flirting with that disaster because he thinks it'll notch him a political win," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) tweeted.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said when Donald Trump was in the White House that not raising the debt ceiling would be catastrophic.

But now that President Joe Biden is in office and Democrats control both chambers of Congress, McConnell is refusing to provide any Republican votes, saying Democrats have to do it on their own with a more complicated procedural maneuver.

"We will support a clean continuing resolution that will prevent a government shutdown," McConnell said Monday. "We will not provide Republican votes for raising the debt limit."

Congress raised the debt ceiling three times on a bipartisan basis when Trump was president and McConnell served as Senate majority leader.

"Note that Democrats never filibustered the debt limit under Bush and actually provided most of the votes for cloture under Trump," Seth Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, tweeted. "What McConnell is doing now is unprecedented, disgraceful, and dangerous."

Republican members are claiming that they don't want to raise the debt ceiling because Democrats are working to pass Biden's economic plan, which would provide funding for infrastructure such as roads and bridges, paid family leave, child care, and added dental and vision benefits under Medicare.

But the raising the debt ceiling means enabling payments on the debt the United States has already accrued, not on future spending. While Trump was in office, Republicans helped add $7.8 trillion to the national debt, the third biggest increase as a share of the size of the economy under any president in U.S. history, the Washington Postreported.

It's unclear what will happen next, as Republicans bring the economy to the brink.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted on Monday night, "The full faith & credit of the United States should not be political. Republicans' reckless decision to block government funding & raising the debt ceiling threatens 6 million jobs, financial ruin for countless families, military paychecks & Social Security payments to seniors."

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.