House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is working to pin the looming government shut down to Republicans, saying it is simply “in their DNA” to shut down rather than compromise. Jeffries points out that last time the government closed for business — for 34 days in 2018/19, the longest shutdown in U.S. government history — the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. Even when Donald Trump was President, Jeffries says, the Republicans “shut themselves down.”
Jeffries asserts these shutdowns occur because uncompromising factions in Congress issue “extreme ransom notes” that less ideological lawmakers refuse to pay. In 2018, the extreme ransom note, he says, was wanting “billions of dollars of taxpayer money” to fund Trump’s “ineffective, medieval border wall.” This time, Jeffries says, the ransom note they won’t pay is full of demands that would “jam [your] extreme ideology down the throats of the American people.”
Jeffries: 2018-2019, they shut the government down for 35 days. When the shutdown began, Trump was president, Republicans controlled the House and the Senate… They shut themselves down. That’s how much it’s in their DNA pic.twitter.com/QbhLoBo1uD
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 21, 2023
Blaming Republicans for problems is, of course, a common Democrat thing to do — but this time Jeffries gets some agreement from his counterpart in the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy has been railing against Republican members of Congress who refuse to even discuss measures to avoid a shutdown, going so far as to deny McCarthy the ability to bring up a vote.
“If you oppose the bill, vote against it in the end. You have over 170 amendments — you can change it if you don’t like it,” McCarthy said yesterday of his GOP colleagues. “But the idea that you vote against a rule to even bring it up, it doesn’t make sense to me.”
A rattled Kevin McCarthy today shaken after right-wingers voted against bringing the defense spending bill to the floor. pic.twitter.com/6f6P1cc0tp
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 19, 2023
