Messaging Wars Begin as Republicans Try To Put Democrats in the Hot Seat on Government Funding

Republicans and Democrats alike are kicking off the messaging war with less than two weeks to go before the latest government funding deadline. The GOP leadership in both the House and Senate are already trying to pin blame on Democrats, well before the government is due to shut down on October 1. The likelihood of a shutdown shot up dramatically this week when Speaker Mike Johnson released the text of his funding proposal that would keep the lights on through mid-November. That funding package is a straight extension of current spending, plus more than $80 million for additional security measures for lawmakers, Supreme Court justices, and the executive branch in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Mr. Johnson told reporters on Thursday that he believes he has the votes to pass the bill through the House on Friday morning, before lawmakers go home for a week-long recess. The Senate will then have only two days to pass the bill when it returns on September 28. The majority leader of the upper chamber, Senator John Thune, started testing out his “Schumer Shutdown” messaging earlier this week, when the minority leader, Senator Charles Schumer, signaled that he and his fellow Democrats would block the bill. “We’re simply asking for a few more weeks to complete bipartisan appropriations work,” Mr. Thune said in a floor speech, which he later posted to X. In his post he included, “#SchumerShutdown.” Any government funding measure will require 60 votes in the Senate in order to pass a procedural hurdle. In an effort to beef up their own counter-programming on the bill, the top Democrats on the House and Senate appropriations committees put forward their own funding proposal.On Wednesday, the appropriators — Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro and Senator Patty Murray — released the text of a bill that would keep the government open through the end of October, extend Biden-era premium Affordable Care Act subsidies indefinitely, and include language to limit President Trump’s ability to unilaterally cut funding for projects approved by Congress. Mr. Johnson, however, tells The New York Sun that Democrats have done nothing to reach out to him about a compromise. He says Republicans will not negotiate ahead of the government funding deadline at the end of the month. “We don’t have any plans to talk about that. We’re gonna get this government funded,” Mr. Johnson tells the Sun. “We’re gonna keep the funding going and our appropriators will have more time to do their work.”The Republicans’ decision to push the message that Democrats would be responsible for blocking any funding deal may be inspired in part by dismal poll numbers some have seen. On Wednesday, a poll from Data for Progress showed that the overwhelming majority of voters would blame Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans for a shutdown. The survey shows 59 percent would blame either Mr. Trump or Republicans in Congress, while 34 percent say they would blame Democrats. A much smaller number of respondents — 7 percent — say they don’t know who they would blame. Democrats’ desire to fight this time comes after the March funding debacle, when acrimony at Mr. Schumer poured out from both Democratic politicians and the party’s base voters. He advanced a Republican-authored spending bill along with nine of his Democratic colleagues, giving Mr. Thune the requisite number of votes to get over the 60-vote procedural hurdle.Government funding deals represent the only opportunity for a minority party to extract concessions from the majority because of the 60-vote threshold. Many liberal commentators who have the ear of Senate Democrats — including the New York Times’s Ezra Klein — have called on Mr. Schumer to take a harder line with Democrats this time around and to push for specific concessions related to healthcare and restricting Mr. Trump’s impoundment powers.

Messaging Wars Begin as Republicans Try To Put Democrats in the Hot Seat on Government Funding

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