Party sticks to its guns on healthcare and says it’s willing to hold out – much to the delight of its progressive supporters
When he sat down to talk about the US government shutdown with reporters from a closely read political newsletter this week, Chuck Schumer sounded as if he was relishing his standoff with the Republicans.
“Every day gets better for us,” he told Punchbowl News. As the shutdown got under way, Schumer explained, the Republican part believed that Democrats would quickly fold and vote to reopen the government, but instead they had stuck to their guns for a week and a half, demanding an array of concessions on healthcare and other issues.
Outrage followed from Republicans, who printed out the Senate minority leader’s remark on posters and condemned it before press conferences. The shutdown has prompted federal agencies to close or curtail operations nationwide, and forced hundreds of thousands of employees to stay home without immediate pay. Schumer, Republicans argued, was being callous.
“You mean… We dont have to do anything, and people are supportive about it? Wow!” -Democrats, probably.
Don’t get me wrong, I want them to keep holding fast, but I just think its funny.
Keep at it, don’t barge. This is the biggest move they’ve done in this term, and I want them to stay strong.
I want them to win.
“What Chuck Schumer is doing right now, it’s sickening.”
Who was it that called a recess early and hasn’t backed down on ACA subsidies?
I must have Mike confused with Chuck.
The Speaker of the House has the power to keep everyone in session for as long as it takes to pass anything. Instead of voting over and over until anything passes, he’s sent them away. The Democrats COULDN’T vote to pass right now, because only Mike Johnson can call them in to vote.
I am pleasantly surprised that they didn’t fold. Hopefully they keep it up.
Democrats refuse to fold
check the temperature in hell.
Cold… REALLY cold
When assessing the bias of an article, look at how it ascribes all of the agency to one party.
Chuck Schumer sounded as if he were relishing his standoff with the Republicans
What Chuck Schumer is doing right now, it’s sickening.”
Democrats are maximizing the leverage they have
Outrage followed from Republicans, who printed out the Senate minority leader’s remark on posters and condemned it
the White House took it upon itself to increase the misery for government employees when Russ Vought, the director of the office of management and budget, began following through on his threat to carry out layoffs.
Notice how Republicans never simply do anything? The one action this article ascribes to Republicans is “following through on his threat”.
Republican layoffs are deep inside a complicated sentence, well beneath the fold. But the HEADLINE, is…that the minority party refuses to vote for a bill they didn’t get any input into. The fact they weren’t allowed any input is unmentioned in the article.
The dems need to stick to their guns on this.
It’d be more in character for them to stick to their water pistols.
So the Republicans control all three branches of government, including both houses of Congress, and it’s the Democrats’ fault that they can’t pass a budget?
Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
I’m not American and I dont understand this part.
What do they need the democrats to do in order to pass the budget?
Just a normal majority is not sufficient for the budget - for this, they need 60%.
They need 60 votes and not a simple majority so they need some Democrats to approve the vote
That’s a Senate rule, which they could change with simple majority if they chose to.
So no, it’s entirely on the Republicans.
Yours jingle? I must’ve missed out on the upgrade at the snip. 🤦🏼♂️
yes. YES!
GOP cut billionaire tax and now say they can’t afford healthcare and shut government over it. Dems just watching and owe nothing.
Just for clarity, if every single R votes yes and every D voted no, would the budget pass? Of does it require a larger majority that the GOP doesn’t have?
The GOP has 53 senators. Under current Senate procedural rules, they need 60 votes to pass a budget.
Having said that, they only need 50 votes to change Senate procedural rules. However, for reasons I do not comprehend, Senators from both bodies have been surprisingly resistant to the idea of removing or adding exemptions to the 60 vote requirement.
Because the requirement for a supermajority means nothing gets done. The Senate is there to ensure that intertia rules.
They could also use Reconciliation, I think. That would just require 50.
They can can only do that once per type of budget bill, per year. And since they can’t stand not getting what they want, they obviously had to use it the first chance they got.
They can can only do that once per type of budget bill, per year
Another Senate rule that could be changed by a simple majority.
The reason the government is shut down is because the Republicans want it that way. All their squawking is just blame-shifting.
Because simple majority would swing back the other way in no time and there would be little the current majority party could do. Every two years it’s likely to change these days
Good. There can be no bipartisan consensus with fascists.
Obviously it requires a larger majority, otherwise they wouldn’t be in this situation. I think it requires 60%
I wouldn’t say “obviously” because I wouldn’t put it past the GOP to just have some refuse to vote along just to blame their opponents for the fallout, especially when they wanted that fallout in the first place.
The majority on this vote is also not the whole story. A reason that R needs a larger majority is because of the filibuster rules allowing D to block the vote. R currently has enough power to remover the filibuster rules and force a vote they can win on majority. But both parties rely on filibuster for decades to block legislation without having to justify their reasons.
https://govfacts.org/analysis/why-the-minority-party-can-force-a-government-shutdown/
TL;DR the role of the Senate is to prevent democracy.
“Democrats are being callous” against federal workers, they say, as their King fires a third of them and asks if he can NOT pay them when the shutdown ends.
Oh, the irony of it all
Back in the Spring, we were all pissed off at Schmuck Schumer after he bent over and helped the MAGA Nazis keep the government open, because they said they’d negotiate on whatever the Dems wanted.
Six months later, and they haven’t negotiated anything, and now they want to end healthcare. They give Sociopathic Oligarchs any tax break they demand, but they can’t give one to the American people for their fucking HEALTH CARE? These people are psychopaths!
Now they are demanding that Dems end the strike, and THEN they’ll negotiate? That’s what they said last time, and now they’re taking our health care away. If we give them our health care so they can open up the government and continue to abuse us, what will they take away in 6 months? Our freedom of speech? Our courts? Our ELECTIONS? OUR FREEDOM?
Nope, keep it closed down until they give us what we demand. The country they want to open isn’t the country we want to open anyway. We’re better off leaving it shut down, they’ll do less damage.
Just to be clear: Schumer is still a worthless sack of shit. The present impasse continues because he’s doing nothing. And the one thing he’s good at is doing nothing.
Oh, yeah, that’s why I call him Schmuck Schumer. I’ve hated him passionately, ever since he and Gillibrand conspired to destroy Al Franken, a good man who would have enthusiastically stood up against Trump and MAGA.
But Schmuckie-Boy didn’t like a strong Progressive rising and challenging for the presidency, and he wanted his friend and Republican-Lite Gillibrand to run, so he cleared the deck for her by stabbing Franken in the back. Then her candidate flamed in out in a few short weeks. They destroyed him for absolutely nothing, and got rid of the best man to fight Trump.
Since then, all he’s done is make it easy for MAGAs to have anything they want. IF we manage to regain power, and we finally punish Trump and his henchmen, we should also investigate Schmuck and his treasonous Democrats who fully cooperated with MAGA in their rise. I suspect that we’ll find that they were either complicit, or more worried about keeping their insider trading privileges than anything else.
MAGAs love to crow about polls showing Dem leadership with lower ratings than Trump, but just because voters hate Dems, doesn’t mean they love MAGA. We actually despise both of them, and would love to throw out support behind a decent candidate who is committed to purging MAGA from society, and then rebuilding a moral America that is committed to the citizens, and not Sociopathic Oligarchs.
Chuck Schumer would fold in an instant if the republicans agreed to name the bill “the bipartisan bill of cooperation” and put $500 towards the Department of Education. The republicans won’t even give him that.
I think the Democratic leadership learned from the last debt ceiling debacle, where they did whatever the GOP and Trump wanted and got pelted with figurative rotten eggs by everyone who was paying attention.
The Obamacare subsidies are an easy hill to die on. They are available to anyone who makes less than a high middle class income, and for a great many Americans, they are the absolutely only way they can afford health insurance.
A self-declaredly populist movement like MAGA should know better than making health care unaffordable to millions to pay for billionaire tax cuts and corruption.
I think the Democratic leadership learned from the last debt ceiling debacle
No, they dont have the backing of a biased DNC anymore. So they’re trying to paint themselves as progressive warriors.
Newsom was the most noticable, but Schumer and Jeffries are doing the same thing. They realized they’re actually going to have competitive primaries, and that negotiating with trump virtually guarantees they lose their next primary.
It’s pure self preservation, they still need replaced. And we absolutely can not afford to keep them in office, let alone leadership positions.
I’d rather have them engaged in a futile struggle to save their useless asses than flat-out capitulating at the first hurdle as they usually do.
I’m not nearly that cynical about literally everything the Dems do, but I’m absolutely cool with replacing the 70 year olds. (Schumer is 74.)
Outside of Bernie, they relied on the DNC squashing primary challengers, then being the only option in the general.
That’s why all the big neoliberals are putting on these acts, they’re more scared of midterms than Republicans are. They need to suck up all the oxygen so real progressives don’t heard, and billionaire owned.media is happy to help.
Quick edit:
And for the record, Bernie needs primaried too, everyone does. Healthy primaries is how we make sure we win generals.
Healthy primaries is how we make sure we win generals.
If we can learn just this one lesson from the last presidential, we will be in so much better shape.
The most cowardly creature on the planet is an American politician - every last one of them. They are feral animals, and the only thing they understand is fear, which is why they attempt to use it on us so often. They think we are just as cowardly as they are.
So put the pressure on them, and they will back down every single time, and if they don’t, then pressure them harder, and then you vote them out, and if they don’t leave, you CRUSH them mercilessly.
These people work for US, and that is not rhetoric, it is literally the truth. They need to know that we expect them to do what they are told, because if we are forced to do their jobs for them, it will be very, very bad for them.
The biggest losers are Schmuck Schumer and Jeffries, who are at least 50% responsible for Trump regaining office. They sat back and let the MAGAs steal the election right before their eyes, and then immediately declared it “Fair & Square,” with no investigation at all.
Sure, the guy has cheated at literally EVERYTHING he has ever done for his entire life, but the ONLY time in his life that he didn’t cheat was the one election that would literally keep him out of prison for the rest of his life? How does that make any sense at all. We KNOW this guy extremely well, and we are supposed to believe that he did any honorably and in good faith. The Dem leadership may be that stupid, or weak, or scared, but I’m not.
If they were doing their most basic jobs of defending America from its enemies, foreign and DOMESTIC, they could have had Trump and his henchman arrested the moment that Biden was sworn in, but they let those jackals run free, and steal the next election.
IF we regain our country, we obviously have to crush, purge, and imprison MAGA Nazis for their crimes, but we should also ruthlessly purge these simpering weak ass Democrats who didn’t do their jobs, and ran away from those mean old scary MAGA twerps when we needed them most.
I love how often commenters try to pass off wild speculation with zero evidence as though it were empirically proven scientific fact
The thing about this “populist” movement is, they are liars.
Billionaire owned media will never call an actual populist a populist…
They want to keep it a dirty word, when it literally just means putting the average citizen’s needs above the needs of the wealthiest.
If we don’t have populism, the alternative is an oligarchy. Those are the two ends of the scale, we can get something near the middle, but it at least has to be fair.
If the wealthiest have an advantage, they’ll never stop accumulating wealth.
And wealth is finite, for them to accumulate more, they got to take it from someone else.
The Obamacare Subsidies are Tax Credits. MAGAs give tax credits to any old Sociopathic Oligarchs just for asking, yet they can’t allow one for American citizens so they can have HEALTH CARE?
MAGA is a populist movement. Actually representing the will of the people is not required to meet the definition of “populist”.
It’s an astroturf effort, with vast resources being thrown into the process of manufacturing consent among the dimwitted.
I could care less about it.
Maybe some consequences will emerge and people will really have to evaluate. Doubtful still.
Couldn’t* care less. Saying “I could care less” means that you care at least a little bit.
Or they’re being sarcastic.
Thanks for the clarification. Would hate for someone to walk away thinking I could care.
LMAO we wouldn’t want that, now would we?
I suppose that makes sense. If you couldn’t care less, you wouldn’t have spent the time bothering yourself to let the rest of us know about it.
Lol the engrish.
