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the DON JONES
INDEX… |
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GAINS
POSTED in GREEN LOSSES
POSTED in RED 10/2/23... 14,868.55 9/25/23... 14,898.83 |
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6/27/13… 15,000.00 |
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(THE DOW
JONES INDEX: 10/2/23... 33,614.52; 9/25/23... 33,963.84; 6/27/13…
15,000.00) |
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LESSON for October 2nd, 2023 –
“SHUTDOWN LOWDOWN!”
Talking
heads said that America was dead – or, at least, a few million government
workers would lose their paychecks with consequences concomitant... unpatrolled
borders through which millions of migrants would pour, parks and playbrounds
closed, children starving, ancient and unsafe infrastructure crumbling and a
military so depleted that Russa would conquer Ukraine in a day, Poland in two,
Germany in a week, London in a fortnite and New York in a month while, in the
east, the Chinese would march into Taiwan and assist the NoKos in their
conquest of SoKo... then seize Japan and, after, overflying fire-ravaged and
unaided Hawaii to take California. The
only possible obstacle to that scenario would be an “eleventh hour miracle” in
which revolting Republicans revolted against one another and joined Democrats –
not to address the debt and budget crisis, but to kick the can down the road
for another month.
And
that’s what happened. House Speaker
Kevin McCarthy stabbed his MAGAllies in the back and joined with every house
Democrat save one (@) to pass a “continuing resolution” (aka can kick) for only
a few pitiful concessions from President Joseph Biden, who engaged in a little
backstabbing of his own against President Zelenskyy and the aggrieved people of
Ukraine, garnered his majority and signed the can kick document... not at the
eleventh hour, but, cutting it closer, at 11:15 PM EDT.
Don
Jones has had a busy week, a season of autumnal cleaning. Old problems resolved, new issue
arising. Against the specture of the
shutdown, seven little teapots debated at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley,
California (as noted in last week’s Lesson)
while both the incumbent and former Presidents dawdled up to Detroit to press
flesh and try to impress striking United Auto Workers with their professions of
support (Biden’s apparently genuine; Trump’s maybe less so). In other labor news, the Writers’ Guild
settled their contract dispute with the Hollywood studios (as also treated the week before),
but the actors remained out on the picket line and new actions were launched
against the videogame moguls while it appears that thousands of hospital
workers are on the on-deck circle.
And
then there were the perennials – inflation, especially at the pump (occasioned
by the weather, the Saudis and the Russians); speaking of whom, the war in
Ukraine and costly American continuing as some Republicans, citing the war
fatigue, made a pivot from Kyev to Moscow part of their shutdown solution
agenda and was, in fact, their only victory (if one can call it that). And the disasters in Libya and Morocco, the
border crisis, the climate crisis and ongoing outpouring of American active,
mass and partisan shooters and the also-ongoing roster of civil and criminal
trials of pretty and ugly defendants ranging from Djonald UnConvicted on down
through the Murdaughs, the killers of Tupac Shakur and balt. woman@ to, even,
Danny Masterson.
And
Traylor, too...
Updates
on these catch-ups in next week’s Lesson, but, this lesson, the Saturday Night
Shutdown (and events leading up to same).
“Millions
of Americans will be impacted if lawmakers can't reach a deal before 12:01 a.m. Oct. 1 warned USA Today
on Friday last. (Attachment One) Said impacts would include irreparable harm to the country's largest food
assistance programs, federally funded preschool, federal college grants and
loans, food safety inspections, national parks and more and more and more...
maybe including the existential survival of the United States and all within
should the Russians and Chinese take advantage of an unpaid and dispirited
military.
Shutdowns
take place when Congress is unable to pass the annual spending bills that
funnel money to government programs and agencies. “When both chambers can't reach a compromise,
funding levels expire and federal agencies must cease all non-essential functions.”
The
“non-essentiality” is largely a creature of partisan subjectivity. Of the four million (give or take) Federal
employees asked to work without pay
(sometimes recoverable, sometimes not), about half are members of our military
and if “non-essentials” like those who staff our nuclear deterrant forces on
land, sea and air start calling in sick, should the shutdown creep on past
Halloween, Russia and China will be very, very happy and perhaps motivated to
take advantage.
USA Today provided some
takeaways... questions and answers likely to arise in anticipation of what theu
(and almost everybody) assumed would arise in Sunday’s autopsy, barring that
miraculous settlement. See details at Attachment One or follow the
media coverage (sometimes accurate, sometimes not) sure to arise by next
week. A few of these were...
Q:
Do national parks close during a government shutdown?
A:
It depends on the park. “The Smithsonian museums and National Zoo in
Washington, D.C. said they would stay open as long as funding allows.” Presidential libraries like that of Ronald
Reagan (where Wednesday’s debate took place) and Jimmy Carter (necessitating
the moving up of his 99th birthday celebration to Sunday) will also close.
Q:
Will Social Security be paid if there is a government shutdown?
A: Social Security recipients will continue to receive checks in the event of a government shutdown and Medicare benefits will
not be interrupted. However, “employees in the Social Security
Administration are likely to be furloughed and government food assistance benefits
could see delay.”
Complications
will also arise in certain otherwise “mandatory” programs, as noted by Fact Check, below.
Q:
Are state employees affected by a government shutdown?
A:
A shutdown could impact state employees whose employers
depend on federal funds to operate and must shut down certain activities that
the government has deemed non-necessary.
Q:
What closes during a government shutdown?
A:
All “non-essential” federal agencies will have to stop operations in a
government shutdown, including the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety
inspections, Environmental Protection Agency inspections and disaster relief by
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Programs like Head Start for preschoolers and the
nation's food aid would also lose funding and come to a halt.
Q:
Will a government shutdown affect air travel?
A: Because air traffic controllers and checkpoint operators are
considered “essential”, the deepest impact would not be on your flight or
cruise although collateral delays
would occur and increase in frequency and duration as time goes on.
Q:
What does a government shutdown mean for Medicare?
A:
“Medicare benefits will continue, though there could be a delay in some
payments.” According to Fact Check
(below and Attachment Three), Medicare
beneficiaries “would not be able to get replacement cards through the Social
Security Administration.”
“What was the longest government shutdown in
U.S. history?” was another question asked and answered by USA Today, above.
“The longest
government shutdown,” they self-responded, lasted
for 35 days from late 2018 to early 2019 under the Trump administration.
“It went into effect after
the House and Senate failed to reach a compromise on a short-term funding plan
to keep the government running through early next year.
“The
critical issue at that time was that Senate Democrats opposed President Donald
Trump’s $5.7 billion request for building a wall on the southern
border.
“Before that, the longest government shutdown lasted from Dec. 5, 1995, to Jan. 6, 1996, when
Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Democratic President Bill Clinton
faced off over taxes. (USA Today, above)
“Over the last five decades, there
have been twenty one federal shutdowns.” (See Attachment One for list)
During the 2013 shutdown Congress, as now, was split between a Republican-led
House and a Democratic-led Senate where Democrats lacked the 60 votes needed to
overcome a filibuster, recalls Time (Attachment Two) Heading toward shutdown,
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who often seemed more focused on setting up his bid for
president than governing, read Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor as part of his 21-hour effort to delay any dealmaking.
“It’s impossible to go more than
10 minutes on cable news or even one scroll on social media right now without
confronting some version of the same argument: that the government shutdown
provisionally slated to start this weekend is the fault
of Republicans and voters will remember it... (t)he troublemakers are getting their turn in the spotlight and those
accustomed to power are finding they have less than they imagined.” Republicans
seemed resigned to being the heavies for a
complete surrender of the political high road so as to secure their base of
malcontents and disgruntleers, and Democrats—perhaps over-confidently
anticipating voter backlash—both thought this would all be gravy for
them.
Time’s historical stroll back to
2013 focused on the disastrous consequences of the shutdown to Virginia
Republicans. “Yet the history is not as
clear-cut as the rhetoric would suggest. In fact, it might give Republicans in
nearby Washington justified reasons to barrel forward” on what Time called “the
haphazard path they are already on.”
One
arch-troublemaker, Bob Gaetz,
R-FL., said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that if the departments of
Labor and Education "have to shut down for a few days as we get their appropriations
in line, that’s certainly not something that is optimal.”
“But I think it’s better than
continuing on the current path we are to America’s financial ruin,” Gaetz said.
Well, on “This Week” yesterday, he was singing a
different, even more troublemaking tune... and the only pot of gold at the end
of the path will be revenge.
@ this week
Some other questions and answers
were provided by Fact Check.org (Attachment Three) which explained the September
30, midnight deadline as being in fulfillment of the close of the Federal
fiscal year, with Congress having “until midnight
on that date to pass the spending bills or a CR” (continuing resolution: aka
can kick) according to Article 1,
Section 9, clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution.
Q: Why was there this government shutdown?
A: In the spring, as Fact Check
recalls, “House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden agreed on
compromise legislation — the Fiscal Responsibility Act — that raised the debt
limit and imposed caps on spending for fiscal years 2024 and 2025.” A “small band” of conservatives who opposed the deal have chosen to
cancel it for Fiscal Year 2024 and have pressured K-Mac to stab President Joe
in the back and support them on pain
of having his Speakership “vacated”.
(See FC’s article “Debt Limit
Agreement Breakdown.”)
Q:
What impact does/will a shutdown have on federal workers?
A: As above, most federal workers have been divided into two
categories:
“furloughed, meaning they do not report to work; and excepted, which includes
workers who are deemed to be essential and must continue working even during a
shutdown (albeit without pay)”. Excepted workers include those whose jobs involve the safety of human life or protection of property, such as air traffic
controllers and law enforcement officers.
Congress will continue to be paid
during the shutdown.
Q:
What other government services would not be affected?
A: Federal workers who are deemed
to be essential must continue working, so the services they provide will
continue. While those employees won’t be paid for their work during the
shutdown until it’s over, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) said that “border protection,
in-hospital medical care, air traffic control, law enforcement, and power grid
maintenance have been among the services classified as essential” and “some
legislative and judicial staff have also been largely protected.”
Q: What otherwise “mandatory”
programs would be partially or conditionally impacted – especially in the event
of a long shutdown?
A: “Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits — formerly known as food stamps — are
part of mandatory spending.” However, CRFB noted that a shutdown could affect
the issuance of benefits over time, “since continuing resolutions have
generally only authorized the Agriculture Department (USDA) to send out
benefits for 30 days after a shutdown begins.” And “stores are not able to
renew their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card licenses, so those whose
licenses expire would not be able to accept SNAP benefits during a shutdown,”
CRFB said.
“Also potentially at
risk during a shutdown would be the Special
Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, which is
considered a permanent program but has been funded by
discretionary spending since fiscal 2016. The program provides food,
breastfeeding support and nutritional services to low-income pregnant,
breastfeeding and postpartum women, as well as kids up to age 5 who are at
nutritional risk.”
The USDA’s 2021
contingency plan says that WIC, and other core nutrition
programs, would “continue operations during a lapse in appropriations” using
money saved up or from other funds whose provenance is in dispute. One expects that lawyers will eventually
descend.
Also in dispute is whether the
lawyers... be they DOJ staff or from other Federal entities, or private
attorneys from complainants who will request compensation as part of any
settlement or judicial decision... will be paid (and by whom).
FactCheck.org added that “(t)he U.S. Postal Service, because it is
self-funded, will remain
open.”
And ABC News also reported on “(w)hich
federal programs would be impacted first
in a government shutdown,” and declared that “the first possible missed or
incomplete paycheck would be on Oct. 13 for many workers,” and reiterated the
findings of USA Today and FactCheck on the Federal Aviation Administration
(operable, but without pay and unable to train new and replacement Air Traffic
Controllers), passport offices (open unless located in closed Federal
buildings), parks (some closed, some open – but with restrooms closed,
requiring visitors to do it like the bears do), on clean water (the EPA will
stop most inspections on water and hazardous waste, although the crisis in and
around New Orleans may or may not be adjudicated “mandatory”.
Workplace safety would suffer due
to OSHA cutbacks, cancer research would cease and services for children like
Head Start and WIC would be impacted; Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack
warning of the "real consequences to real people when there is a
shutdown."
The FDA will also delay food
safety inspections, making retailers of E Coli contaminated cantaloupes very
very happy.
Up
there in Iowa, to where Presidential candidates fly thick as flies buzzing
round rotten cantaloupes, The Des Moines Register published its own tolling of
the impacts of the shutdown on Middle America – sending no less than eight
reporters through the cornfields to locate and bring back shutdown
intelligence.
“You don’t have to live in
Washington for a government shutdown to affect you,” they concluded.
A4@
Some of the impacts not previously
mentioned included funds that the Senate has approved, but the House will delay
or destroy... including...
·
$4.5 billion
allocated to Ukraine
·
$6 billion in emergency funding to the Federal Emergency
Management Agency for the Disaster Relief Fund
·
$2.9 billion for Federal Aviation Administration
operations
“House conservatives said the bill
(was) dead on arrival in the lower chamber. Any spending package, they say, has
to include border security provisions.
“If you want to continue federal spending, then you have to secure the
border,” said Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., an ultra-conservative lawmaker and
key negotiator in the House. (Attachment
Five)
Senate Minority Leader and radical
(tho’ not rabid) Republican Mitch McConnell attempted to warn the hardliners in
Congress off their path to perdition, stating that the shutdown @a4
A punitively inclined Democrat, Rep.
Angie Craig of Minnesota introduced legislation to cut off the
legislators’ paychecks last Wednesday.
“I’m introducing legislation to
block Member pay during a McCarthy shutdown, because it’s ridiculous that we
still get paid while folks like TSA workers are asked to work without a
paycheck,” Craig said.
Congressional staffers however,
will not receive pay... but are considered “essential” and will receive their
paychecks retroactively after the shutdown ends (unlike the cafeteria workers
and janitors who will be S.O.L. for the duration).
“Military personnel will not be
paid until such time as Congress appropriates funds available to compensate
them for this period of service,” the Defense Department said in a September
memo to Pentagon leaders preparing for a potential lapse in spending for the
“1.3 million active-duty service members and 800,000 reservists.”
But the department said personnel
would continue working regardless, the Iowans reported. (Unless and until they decide to run away to
North Korea!) “Federal workers are
traditionally reimbursed for lapses in funding once Congress agrees to resume
spending, but the lapse in paychecks “can be difficult for staffers without
savings.”
On Sept. 28, 2018, President
Donald Trump signed a spending bill that included the Defense Department, which
covered the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, according to a report by the
nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
But funding for the Coast Guard
dried up Dec. 21, 2018, for the 35-day shutdown because the agency is funded
under the Department of Homeland Security, the report said.
So the smugglers of drugs, guns
and child prostitutes were very, very happy and hoped to be again.
Among other consequences: the Dow
is Down (see Index) but, according to Iowan investment experts, a government
shutdown wasn't likely to help the stock market, investment but it probably
won't hurt much.
In other words, said Sam Stovall,
chief investment strategist at CFRA Research, the shutdown is "more
of a headline event than a bottom-line event."
But, if financiers like Moody’s decide that the shutdown hurts America’s
credit rating, it would “underscore the weakness” of U.S. institutional and governance strength compared to countries
with similar credit ratings.
On the bright side, pensions to
Federal retirees will continue to be paid and, according to the DM Register, a
government shutdown lasting three months or longer also likely “won't impact
NORAD's beloved Santa Tracker.”
A6 a dupe, Insert other, as desired@
Milley – hill, oilitici=o guardian
cnn reuters
Military.com stars and stripes
@
impacted
X22 x23 x29
@military
A6
above
Military
sustenance was another of the many skeletons of contention as the “small band” of
extremists laid off its attacks upon RINOs and Impeachable Joe Biden so as to
focus its fire on a seemingly feckless K-Mac.
The war turned personal when
Rep.
Matt Gaetz and Speaker Kevin McCarthy got into a “testy exchange” during a
shutdown strategy meeting, according to a source in the room who whispered the
dirty deeds and details to CNN (September 28, Attachment Seven. Gaetz
reportedly stood up and confronted McCarthy about whether his allies were
paying conservative influencers to bash Gaetz in social media posts – an
allegation circulating on social media and one the speaker’s office has denied.
McCarthy’s response, according to the source in the room, was that he
wouldn’t waste his time or money on Gaetz.
After the exchange, members in the
room could be heard complaining about Gaetz, with one member calling him a
“scumbag” and another saying “F**k off,” according to a third source in the
room while the White House warned of impacts to national security, including
the 1.3 million active-duty troops who would not get paid during a shutdown –
nor would the ICEmen and border agents so beloved by the MAGAmanagers aggrieved
about the human swarm of migrants assailing our southern (and a few even
contend northern) border.
To that end, CNN reported that “a
small group” of Senate negotiators had been “frantically working to find a
series of amendments that could boost border security and be added to the
Senate’s short-term spending bill”. Sen.
Thom Tillis (R-@), a member of that group, said on Thursday that they were
making progress, but negotiations collapsed and alarmists cried “Alarm!”
“It’s important to remember that
if we shut down the government – for those of us who are concerned about the
border and want it to be improved – the border patrol … have to continue to
work for nothing,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned at a news
conference Wednesday to no apparent effect other than the passage of a useless
resolution derided and demolished by the House.
“You
can’t let the extremes control the operations in the House,” said Sen. Ben
Cardin, D-Md., who now chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after
twice-indicted Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., stepped down,. “Our national security
depends upon it as well as the inconvenience of costing the American taxpayer.”
In
one example, Cardin said a shutdown would affect the civilian faculty at the
U.S. Naval Academy located in Maryland. If a shutdown goes on for any length of
time, Cardin said the midshipmen will not be able to complete the accredited
number of courses they need in time.
‘This
is just one example affecting the readiness of our nation,” he told USA Today
(Attachment One, above).
“The
Chinese army is not facing a shutdown nor is Russia shutting down its efforts
to conquer Ukraine, and the U.S. Congress must take steps to avoid a government
shutdown,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in a Defense Department
statement (Attachment Eight).
"A
shutdown would degrade and impact our operational planning and coordination,
impact our more than 800,000 civilians, and severely diminish our ability to
recruit and retain quality individuals for military service," other DOD
officials chimed in.
On
the strategic level, a shutdown would play into the hands of U.S. competitors. A
shutdown requires money, and it also requires money when the government starts
up again — not to mention the lost time. "No amount of funding can make up
for lost time," the official said. "A shutdown impacts our ability to
outcompete the PRC [People's Republic of China] — it costs us time as well
as money, and money can't buy back time, especially for lost training
events."
The
broadsaid also noted that the Defense Commissary Agency would close
commissaries in the United States but would keep overseas facilities open –
probably not so grave a situation since military families without their
paychecks would be reduced to hunting squirrels and possums on the bases,
eating roots and berries or scrounging in civilian garbage dumpsters.
DOD
civilians, including military technicians, who are not necessary to carry out
or support excepted activities would be furloughed – thus receiving nothing at
the end of the shutdown (except a “thank you for your service.”)
Downtown in the border towns, local officials in border towns were worried
that staff shortages among federal workers will make it harder to stop criminal
activity and process an influx of migrants. Victor Treviño, the mayor of Laredo, Tex., foresees a
“catastrophic situation” with House Republicans are unable to agree on a
spending plan.
Treviño, who shouted out his grito
de alarma to reporters from Time a week ago (September 25, Attachment Nine) is
now worried in particular about a reduction of staffing at the processing center for migrants in Laredo, which he says
processes approximately 1,000 people per day. “All these migrants could wind up in the streets,” he says. “They
have small children, there’s families, we can’t just turn a blind eye to that.”
Depending on how long the shutdown takes—and how long officers can forgo their
paychecks—the local processing capacity could come to a halt, he says. “People
need to feed their family; they need to pay their bills.”
(Then again, local patriots
sympathetic to the “militarize the border” sentiments at the Reagan Library
debate could form Committees of Vigilance and hide in the weeds with machine
guns to exterminate the invading
migrant hordes.)
Vigilantes aside, there are also
other security concerns. “There’s always the danger of illegal activity from
cartels… smuggling drugs and things like that,” Treviño continues. “If there’s no security, then that
activity will increase tremendously.”
And with increased supply, the
price of fentanyl on the street will surely drop and users will buy and consume
more and die in the doing. Everybody wins, except (some of) their
families.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas
Democrat who represents the San Antonio area, told TIME that thousands of
servicemembers in his district now working without pay and their financial
burdened families have contacted him in desperation. “My office has already
been getting calls from constituents who are worried about making ends meet,” he
says. “I hope cooler heads will prevail in the Republican Party to keep the
government open.”
But Doris Meissner, senior fellow
at the Migration Policy Institute, expressed confidence that a settlement was
just around the corner and law enforcement and military families could “hold
on” until the shutdown ends... given that Trump’s 34 day shutdown (below) didn’t
provoke “a major exodus of law enforcement employees in border towns during
that time.”
And Blake Barrow, CEO of Rescue
Mission of El Paso, which operates two shelters—one specifically for migrants
and another for American citizens— didn’t seem “fazed” by the shutdown’s impact
on his work. “The government’s (wasn’t) doing much to help us anyway,” he said.
The last government shutdown of
December 2018, when most government activity came to a halt for 34 days, the
longest in the modern era, saw the government “required by law to repay federal
employees and military personnel.”
(Time, September 25, Attachment Ten)
Federal contractors were not and
will not be compensated for missed time.
In addition to those complications
noted above, the White House estimates that roughly 10,000 children would lose
access to childcare starting in October as
disruptions to programs like Head Start, which offers grants to childcare
organizations, could force some childcare centers to close.
And with disaster relief efforts
in Maui and Florida underway after recent wildfires and hurricanes (not to mention
the weekend flooding in Gotham plus humanitarian expenses in Morocco, Libya
and, as ever, Ukraine), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has
warned that its Disaster Relief Fund is dangerously low and could be depleted
if the government shuts down without approving emergency funding. “A government
shutdown will slow down our recovery efforts,” Rep. Jill Tokuda, who represents
the Maui area in Congress, told TIME in August.
The Senate’s 79 page bill
proposed to fund
the government at current levels and included about $6 billion
supplemental funding for Ukraine and $6 billion in U.S. disaster assistance for Maui and elsewhere; even
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell appearing on board with the bipartisan
Senate plan saying, “Government shutdowns are bad news.” (AP, Attachment Eleven)
Against the “mounting chaos” of
shutdown and impeachment, President Biden warned the Republican conservatives
off their hard-line tactics, saying that funding the federal government is “one
of the most basic fundamental responsibilities of Congress," and reminding
K-Mac of the federal funding deal they had struck earlier this
year, subsequently approved by both houses of Congress.
But Trump pushed enough Republican
hardlinerss to dismantle the deal with Biden. “Unless you get everything, shut
it down!” Trump wrote in all capital letters on social media. “It’s time Republicans
learned how to fight!”
Trump ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor
Greene, R-Ga., who is also close to McCarthy, said she would be a “hard no”,
because the deal continued to provide at least $300 million for the war in Ukraine.
Gaetz said on the Fox News Channel
that a shutdown is not optimal but “it's better than continuing on the current
path that we are to America's financial ruin.”
He continued threatening to call a vote to oust McCarthy from his job,
even as his allies were threatening to remove President Joe from his.
Kurt Couchman, senior fellow in
fiscal policy at the orthodox conservative Americans for Prosperity, told Fox
News Digital. "We’re just running out of time," as moderate
Republicans, growing nervous about the prospect of a shutdown, attempted to sit
down with Democrats for a bipartisan deal called the Bipartisan Keep America
Open Act (which would have funded the government at fiscal year 2023 levels
until Jan. 11, 2024) much to the ire of their hardline colleagues. (Fox, Attachment Twelve)
He reasoned that. at a minimum,
lawmakers would act to not let the FAA expire. "If there's any kind of
disruption at all to air travel, a shutdown will end almost immediately,"
Couchman predicted, adding tnat a shutdown would reflect negatively on both
parties.
His concern was premature..
Instead, government began tumbling
into what conservative
commentator Charlie Sykes called a “Seinfeld shutdown”
according to the liberal Huffington Post (Attachment Thirteen).
“What
is this shutdown about? The executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce
― which is a Republican-leaning organization ― says he’s thinking
of this as the ‘Seinfeld shutdown,’ because it’s a shutdown about nothing,”
Sykes, founder of The Bulwark website, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid.
The
shutdown has also earned America little but contempt from its Western-oriented
allies – although Russia and China,
officially silent, are certainly... if discreetly... heartened by the inability
of their most dangerous (small “d”) democratic rival.
“The world's largest economy is once again on the verge of a
convulsion, with the lights due to go out at the weekend,” the bean counters at
France 24 shook their collective heads before the AmeriCrash. (Attachment Fourteen)
“The party's leadership does not even have the votes to
advance a short-term funding bill at 2023 spending levels – known as a
continuing resolution – to keep the government open past midnight on Saturday,”
scoffed the confounded and contemptuous Frogs who all but broke off diplomatic
relations during the Trump Administration... only to realize that, like a
horror movie villain... “heee’s Back!’
"UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!," former
president Donald Trump demanded in a post on his Truth Social platform as he
led calls for the Republican hardliners to dig in.
“If Republicans in the House don’t start doing their jobs,
we should stop electing them,” President Joe responded, accusing GOP lawmakers
of failing to fulfil “one of the most basic fundamental responsibilities of
Congress” according to Al Jazeera (September 26th, Attachment
Fifteen)
They also took notice that Trump, the current frontrunner in
the Republican Party’s 2024 nomination race, had “urged his allies in the House
to hold a hard line.
“Unless you get everything, shut it down!” he wrote in all capital
letters on his Truth Social platform on Sunday.
A week agp. the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein and Marianna
Sotomayor had called the proposed shutdown a consequence of a “fraction of the
Federal budget” with the Ho use and Senate “...each looking to jam their
preferred legislation through the other chamber in a risky game of
brinkmanship,” which, accordingly, tumbled over the edge of the cliff as in the
conclusion of #@”, crashing and burning on Saturday night.
But while the far-right rebels in McCarthy’s caucus said the
rising national debt wa such a threat that it was worth forcing the government
to close down in pursuit of spending cuts, the Post reporters contended that
the “uncomfortable fiscal reality” was that “most of what is driving federal borrowing
to record levels wasn’t even up for discussion this week.” (Attachment Sixteen)
The “fraction”... programs that provide services like
education, medical research and aid for families in poverty which have been
targeted by the rebellious Congressthings... pale in comparison to the
government’s biggest annual expenses. However: the retirement programs Medicare
and Social Security that boost the budget up to more than $6 trillion every
year.
Time reported that he nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office
projects that the annual federal deficit is expected to rise to nearly $3
trillion per year by next decade, up from roughly $2 trillion this year. If the
conservatives in the House GOP get everything they’re seeking now, that number
could drop to about $2.8 trillion per year.
“It’s a completely symbolic fight that ignores 90 percent of
the actual budget,” said Brian Riedl, who served as an aide to former senator
Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and is now a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a
conservative-leaning think tank.
Some Republicans have privately bemoaned that many of their
hard-right colleagues do not understand the government funding process and only
began to make more demands when bills were nearly ready for a floor vote.
Some Republicans have privately bemoaned that many of their
hard-right colleagues do not understand the government funding process and only
began to make more demands when bills were nearly ready for a floor vote.
“I think more of these folks need to have an
[appropriations] 101 when they first get here,” moderate Rep. David Joyce
(R-Ohio) said earlier this month. “If you want to control the outcomes, you
have to work harder on the appropriations process.”
“Go take that out of your friggin’ IRS expansion and leave
me alone. I’m not worried about that,” Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy
scoffed. “What I’m worried about is we
shouldn’t have to get there because what we should do is pass the
appropriations bill and do our job.”
When Moody’s and Wells Fargo warned that the shutdown might
impact America’s credit rating (CNBC, Attachment Seventeen), the network also
took note of a social media post by President Joe to the effect that the
shutdown would damage not only the U.S. credit rating, but the status of the
dollar as the world’s default currency.
“There’s a small group of extreme House Republicans who
don’t want to live up to that deal,” Biden said in his video, posted on X,
formerly known as Twitter. (CNBC,
Attachment Eighteen)
“So they’re determined to shut down the government, shut it
down now and it makes no sense,” the president said. “I’m prepared to do my
part, but the Republicans in the House of Representatives refuse.”
“They refuse to stand up to the extremists in their party,
so now everyone in America could be forced to pay the price,” Biden said.
Whereas the Senate Majority
Leader, Adam Schiff@, and Minority Leader McConnell had reached a deal on stopgap funding to avoid shutdown (Guardian UK,
Attachment Nineteen) and NAACP President Derrick Johnson sent an open letter to McCarthy forcefully calling on him
to "swiftly resolve the latest manufactured budget crisis and avoid a needless
government shutdown that would disproportionately harm millions of Black
Americans," (NBC, Attachment Twenty), former President Trump escalated his
war on Biden, McConnell and, should he weaken, McCarthy.
Djonald UnSatisfied urged Republicans to “force a government
shutdown if they don’t get “everything” they’re asking for in the 2024 budget
negotiations.” He told the GOP in a Truth Social post to “hold firm on their demands for more border
security and putting a stop to “election interference” and the “weaponization”
of the Justice Department,” referring to his claims that the agency is working
on behalf of Democrats to prevent him from being re-elected. (Forbes, Attachment Twenty One)
“It’s time Republicans learn how to fight!” he wrote, while accusing
Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) of bowing to Democrats, calling
him “the weakest, dumbest and most conflicted ‘leader’ in U.S. Senate history.”
Biden fired back, accusing the MAGAmaster of acting as “MAGA House Republicans’ puppetmaster” in a
statement from campaign spokesperson TJ Ducklo. “Donald Trump is rooting for a government
shutdown and couldn’t care less what it would mean for American families,”
Ducklo said, adding “every American remembers the jobs lost and lives damaged
by Donald Trump’s extremism . . . and now he’s once again playing political
games with people’s lives by capitalizing on House Republicans’ weakness and
doing whatever it takes to regain power.”
Still, several government agencies began sending out notices
of warning, survival and good cheer to Federal workers – acknowledging that
millions of employees and military service members mignt stop receiving pay in
just three days, “unless lawmakers in Congress can clinch a last-minute — and
increasingly unlikely — deal that would extend government funding beyond
Saturday.”
The Department of Homeland Security, for example,
(Washington Post, September 22, Attachment Twenty Two) warned that: “...some of
you will be temporarily furloughed while others who perform excepted functions
will continue to execute your assigned duties.”
On Thursday morning, some agencies began alerting many of
these workers about the prospects of a funding lapse, which means they cannot
be paid for as long as Congress fails to come to an agreement — though the
majority would get paid back once any shutdown ends.
Michael Linden, a former top official at the White House
Office of Management and Budget, said the early notices reflected a political
reality: Unlike past spending battles that yielded an eleventh-hour deal, “the
chances of a shutdown are much higher.”
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) pledged anew this week
that he would advance the stopgap that would have addressed the demands of his
far-right flank, including new border security provisions that many Democrats
oppose. “Some conservatives have also demanded deep spending cuts that Biden
has rejected,” the Post reported, “while signaling they may not support any
temporary funding agreement, known as a continuing resolution, at all.”
Gaetz and Greene and the ninety-some GOP holdouts didn’t get
any of this – nothing but Zelenskyy’s head on a platter.
Federal employees would face the “uncertainty of: ‘Will I
ever make up for this lost paycheck?’” said Democratic Rep. Gerald E. Connolly,
whose Virginia district includes a substantial number of government workers.
The financial trouble could be more pronounced for contractors that serve
Washington, who are not guaranteed pay in the event of a shutdown.
“The natural reaction for most people is to pull back,” he
said, as these families look to conserve money. “You have this huge ripple effect
from a shutdown that affects the economy writ large.”
The economic “ripple” might include higher prices, a lower
Dow and... at worst... a downgrading of the government’s credit ratings
Reuters (Attachment Twenty Three) Reuters
headline @get
But the libertarian journal “Reason” called Reuters’
fearmongering a lie.
“(H)alf of U.S. newborns are not eligible for WIC in the
first place, as it is a means-tested program designed to serve the poor, and
half of newborns in the United States are not in poverty or close to it.”
(September 26, Attachment Twenty Four)
Calling on the poorest of poor Americans to trust the
markets and private charitable concerns (instead of the evil Government),
Reason declared that “...(i)f fully half of American infants
are starving or in danger of it—and if that money will soon be pulled because
Congress can't agree on appropriations bills—that would be a dire situation.
Thankfully, that's not really what's happening, and there are generally
multiple welfare programs that serve these groups at once.”
While some of the programs that poor people rely on to
scrape by may be temporarily halted or skeletal in staffing, “basic necessities
will, in some form, remain available. Media outlets and politicians looking to
score points should not claim otherwise.”
As friction between K-Mac and the holdouts like
Greene and Gaeta escalated, the Speaker said that: “If people want to close the government, it only makes it
weaker. Why would they want to stop paying the troops or stop paying the border
agents or the Coast Guard?
“I don't understand how that makes you stronger, I don't
understand what point you're trying to make,” McCarthy told reporters. “Why
would you want to stop paying those individuals? I couldn't understand somebody
that would want to do that.” (Spectrum
News, Attachment Twenty Five)
“The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and
now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!!
Whoever is President will be blamed, in this case, Crooked (as Hell!) Joe
Biden!” former President Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media network,
on Sunday night. “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN! Close the Border,
stop the Weaponization of ‘Justice,’ and End Election Interference.”
Lawmakers were off on Monday, last week, for the Jewish
holiday on Yom Kippur, but the plan was for votes to be held beginning on
Tuesday on some appropriation bills. However, a short-term funding measure
known as a “continuing resolution” continued floating to the surface of the
American mind like an un-concreted mob corpse in New York’s East River.
And,
as Gotham drowned beneath eight inches of rain over the weekend and a little
raven quoth into the MAGA mousket ears that the McCarthyism that had betrayed
President Joe would, in turn, turn on them.
Perhaps having an inkling of impending danger (or the
wipeout of same), Gaetz himself placed the blame at McCarthy’s feet and told a Fox News reporter last week when victory still appeared secured for the
Republican insurgents that... in the unlikely event of a settlement or
can-kick... patriots couldn’t blame anyone besides the Speaker; specifically
absolving President Joe, House Democrats or Senate Majority Leader Chuck
Schumer – a posture supported by Biden’s Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre,
who agreed that “(t)his is indeed a Republican shutdown. So, they got to get to
it. They got to fix it,” she said.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) agreed upon
the matter of who should get the blame:
“the Republican-led House.” (Huffington
Post, Attachment Twenty Six)
Or not
Rep. Mike Johnson: GOP Doesn’t Want Gov. Shutdown but
Americans Have ‘Had Enough’ of Destructive Democrat Policies
Americans have “had enough” of Democrat
policies “destroying” our economy and security, according to House Republican
Conference Vice Chair Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who asserted that the GOP
seeks a change in how Washington works and is genuinely trying to prevent a
government shutdown.
Addressing the House on Tuesday, Rep.
Mike Johnson (R-LA) emphasized a shutdown is not something the Republican Party
wants.
“I just heard one of our
colleagues over here suggest that somehow Republicans are in favor of a
government shutdown — no one desires a government shutdown,” he stated.
“What we desire and what we are
working towards is changing how Washington works,” he explained to the
conservative journal Breitbart... (Attachment Twenty Seven)... to force an end
to the reckless spending, corruption, weaponization of federal agencies, and
open borders that are destroying our country's liberty, opportunity, and
security.
According
to Rep. Johnson, that can only happen by changing the “decades of reckless
spending and corruption.”
In the event of a shutdown, Rep.
Nancy Mace (R-SC) weighed in on the possibility of a federal
government shutdown, saying she gives the scenario a 50-50 chance of occurring
and that, if it had, Republicans would’ve taken the fall.
“Well,
it’s always going to be blamed on the Republicans,” she said – staking out a
position on the middle ground between Gaetz and the Democrats. “But if you are
watching and you’re paying attention to what the federal government and
Congress has done over the last 20 or 30 years, you would know that this
problem was created by both sides of the aisle.”
“And
if we avoid a shutdown, it’ll be because Republicans teamed up with Democrats
to spend more money than ever in the history of the United States to keep the
government open,” she prophesied – accurately as it turned out.
The
Senate stopgap funding bill, which proved a starting point for the eventual can
kick... minus the $6B aid to Ukraine... was the focus of a series of Tuesday
takeaways by the liberal GUK (which also included former President’s civil
battle with New
York attorney general Letitia James and Judge
Arthur Engoron as may... if he’s found guilty... cost him Trump Tower; while,
to balance the scale with Democratic perfidy, noted that First K-9 Commander
had bitten another Secret Service agent) featuring what the Brits called
K-Mac’s “bizarre” contention that his Republican detractors were “aligning themselves with Joe
Biden” (which, of course, is exactly what he
ultimately did).
GUK
also reported that, while the legislators were legislating, denouncing and
conniving, Hunter Biden was launching another lawsuit
against the beleaguered Rudy G., President Joe was gladhanding striking United
Auto Workers, Donald
Trump had launched “a lengthy and largely baseless attack on wind turbines for
causing large numbers of whales to die, claiming that “windmills” are making
the cetaceans “crazy” and “a little batty”.
“Trump, the frontrunner for the
Republican presidential nomination, used a rally in South Carolina to assert
that while there was only a small chance of killing a whale by hitting it with
a boat, “their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen
before. No one does anything about that.”
“They are washing up ashore,” said
Trump, the twice-impeached former US president and gameshow host who is facing
multiple criminal indictments.”
And GUK reported that NBC reported
that... asked why he was not willing to strike a deal with congressional
Democrats on a short-term funding bill to keep the government open, McCarthy
replied:
“Why don’t we just cut a deal with
the president?”
Another conservative
medium, the Washington Examiner noted, without commentary, that Senate Majority
Leader Chuck Schumer had announced his bipartisan “continuing resolution” was “a temporary solution, a bridge
toward cooperation and away from extremism.”
(Attachment Twenty Nine)
And another... the Fox run New
York Post (Attachment Thirty) reported that the House and Senate... back in
session Tuesday after taking an extended break for a three-day
weekend and the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur... would
return to “considering” the can kick as inspired K-Mac to channel the Monkees:
declaring “I’m a believer.”
As was his adversary Schumer, who
told CNN that: “I am still hopeful. I am still optimistic that once the Senate
acts in a bipartisan [way] … that maybe the House will follow our example,” but also adding: “I’ve
never seen a group that is as hellbent on a shutdown as these crazy MAGA
Republicans — that small group!”
That small group, over the
previous weekend, had drafted an even more severe CR, calling for a 27%
reduction in non-Pentagon and non-Veterans Affairs discretionary
spending, according to Bloomberg, up from the 8% reduction from
the prior deal — and all but ensuring its failure in the Senate or veto by
Biden.
The Post ghosties also reported on Ol’ 45’s new post on Truth Social – appealing to the faithful:
“UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” in all caps and the division between
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who encouraged the dissenters to “stand strong,” as
opposed to Nikki Haley’s contention that even a partial shutdown “would only
hurt taxpayers.”
With the Senate passing their CR 76-22 including $1.59 trillion in
discretionary spending in fiscal 2024. and the House throwing up a blizzard of “partisan Republican spending bills
with no chance of becoming law,” (demanding another $120 billion in cuts, plus
tougher legislation that would stop the flow of immigrants at the U.S. southern
border with Mexico, as well as the pivot to Putin on Ukraine) Mitchy.
"We can take the standard
approach and fund the government for six weeks at the current rate of
operations, or we can shut the government down in exchange for zero meaningful
progress on policy," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed.
For
many charts, graphs and photographs: see
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-house-hold-procedural-votes-partial-government-shutdown-looms-2023-09-28/
A further appeal by Reason’s Libertarian-leaning
opinionators echoed the “Shut It All Down” response to years and trillions of
American accumulated debt with Reasonable Liz Wolfe (Attachment Thirty Two,
September 26th) calling for the termination of Federal projects
including the TSA and EPA (if not the FBI, CIA and @),
And while Rep. Gaetz was grandstanding with a Daily
Caller letter proclaiming his willingness to suspend his own personal salary, K-Mac,
disappointed over his hostile reaction from the Senate, was reported to be turning to Biden as a potential
savior—“or at least someone to blame, should the shutdown come to pass.” (Yahoo/Daily Beast September 26th, Attachment Thirty
Three)
Despite the sense of doom seeping
into the halls of the Capitol, “the Florida Republican has remained cavalier
about the prospect of a shutdown. “I think it would be a shutdown we could
endure,” he told reporters last week. “We would have to own it. We would have to
hold accountable the leaders who brought it.”
“House
Speaker Kevin McCarthy is at a crossroads,” opined Time’s Nik Popli before the
Eleventh Hour (September 26, Attachment Thirty Four).
“He
can either shut down the government and possibly save his standing with the GOP
hardliners threatening to oust him, or work with Democrats to pass a short-term
spending bill and avert a government shutdown—potentially at the expense of his
own speakership.”
He
chose the latter.
Asked if he was willing to work
with House or Senate Democrats to keep the government open, McCarthy signaled
that “he would rather bypass talks with congressional Democrats and instead
strike a spending deal directly with President Joe Biden.”
That tactic failed, so K-Mac
swallowed his pride (and perhaps his Speakership) and did the nasty with Schiff
and Schumer who, after their defenestration of Ukraine, got pretty much what
they wanted – at least until November.
And now the onus is on the House
Democratic minority who face a difficult decision: “support McCarthy in order
to keep the government funded and risk angering their own party's base, or
seize the opportunity to potentially remove him from office.”
The decision is, perhaps, made
less difficult inasmuch as while Democrats can support or veto K-Mac in the
event of a motion to remove, should they sit back and let Gaetz have his
vengeance, Republicans will become embroiled in an intra-party partisan
struggle, meaning that no Speaker might be chosen for weeks, or months.
Meaning that no legislation will
be introduced, debated and maybe passed... for weeks or months.
Like Khan of the old Star Trek
movie, Gaetz will have struck his blow against Order from beyond his political
grave. Nancy Pelosi and AOC declared
yesterday that they owed nothing to the Speaker – but will satisfaction over
vacating him be worth the chaos that the Eleventh Hour was supposed to preent?
Some Democrats may see the
opportunity for another deal... demanding concessions in exchange for their
support of McCarthy. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat who sits on the
Appropriations committee, tells TIME that he would be willing to help McCarthy
“for the good of the institution” by tabling a motion to vacate, a proposal
that he says several Democrats would support to keep the government open.
But would they want to perpetuate
a Republican speakership essentially controlled by a zombie, against whom the
vengeful minority will hamstring with motions to vacate from now until January,
2025?
“Either we do it now or he’s going
to live and work the next year and a half under this threat,” Cuellar
reckoned. “And he can’t operate under a
constant threat by his far-right people.”
“It really does suggest how
extreme and out of the mainstream this faction of House Republicans is, and it
puts Kevin McCarthy in a very difficult position,” Michael Linden, a former
Office of Management and Budget official told Time.
Rep. Chip Roy, a hard-right Texas
Republican who worked on the short-term funding bill, told Fox News last week
that his party’s holdouts are “gonna eat a s—t sandwich” that they “probably
deserve to eat” if they continue to block a plan to keep the government open.
Politically, a split within ultra-conservative circles could be McCarthy’s best
hope of survival.
Gaetz, on Thursday, had gotten
into what CNN called a “testy exchange” confronting McCarthy about whether his
allies were paying conservative influencers to bash Gaetz in social media posts
–“an allegation circulating on social media and one the speaker’s office has
denied.
“McCarthy’s response, according to
the source in the room, was that he wouldn’t waste his time or money on Gaetz.” (Attachment Thirty Five)
After the exchange, “members in the
room could be heard complaining about Gaetz, with one member calling him a
“scumbag” and another saying “F**k off,” according to another source in the
room.
It’s all personal now.
After@
Castro’s
cooler heads Sunday gronk ice bath
@
Saturday night showdown
@
Sunday talkshows
@NEXT
for SHUTDOWN (Sunday and Monday 10/1, 2)
@conclusion
A0
tv lady historian fri morning
|
Our
Lesson: September September Twenty Fifth through October 1st, 2023 |
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Monday, September 25, 2023 Dow:
34,006.88 |
A tentative
deal between the Hollywood studios and the WGA is announced after 146 days
and the picketing stops. The SAG is
still on strike and now the United Autoworkers have hit the Big Three companies
with President Joe promising to join in on the picket line. As he blows off Wednesday’s Republican
presidential primary debate, former President Donald Trump says he will meet
the autoworkers, too, instead. He also
calls for Republican legislators to shut down the government, but faces
problems of his own... upholding the First Amendment against the liberal
trolls who want to invalidate his candidacy based on his indictments for
“insurrectionary” acts, based on a Civil War era law passed in Colorado. Democrats have their problems too...
namely New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez: the “Golden Congressman” trading favors
to Egypt for a Mercedes, cash and gold bars.
As the week wears on, more and more of his colleagues tell him to
resign, but he does find a friend... George Santos. Football is leaping from the sports pages
into the celebrity culture with Taylor Swift headed to Kansas City to watch
her new squeeze, Travis Kelcey. And
the NFL announces that Usher (or Ur-shur) will headline the 2024 Superbowl. |
|
|
Tuesday, September 26, 2023 Dow:
33,618.88 |
It’s the Equilux – an equal twelve hours of
day and night.
Longer nights of violent crime explode – Oakland, California businesses
hold a one day strike against crime, hundreds of masked looters overrun
Philadelphia retailers and companies like Target are closing more and more
unsafe and unprofitable while “slider” robbers haunt parking lots and gas
stations, holding up people at gunpoint and murdering some, like the female
tech leader in Baltimore raped and killed by an early paroled career
criminal. Fentanyl fugitive hubby of
daycare child killers.
Climate change darkens the prospects of the world too... scientists
agree that Antarctic ice is melting as the temperature of the world’s oceans
rises, generating more and more deadly strorms with some areas of the country
having too much water while others, like the entire Mississippi basin dries
up and New Orleans’ water becomes undrinkable.
While President Joe is in Detroit, barking with the autoworkers at the
corporations, his dog Commander bites another Secret Service agent. Time for him to join Major in exile in
Delaware? |
|
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Wednesday, September 27, 2023 Dow: 33,550.27 |
WGA
membership approves the deal that will give them more money and protection
against robots... which means that the late nite comedians will be back on
the air soon. But not the scripted TV
shows and movies, since the actors are still on strike and labor strife
spreads to videogame producer and, now, Vegas. As former President Trump does Detroit and
the rest of the Republicans squawk and squabble at the Reagan Library,
Djonald loses a civil case for financial fraud that could cost him Trump
Tower and he snaps back at New York’s AyGee Letitia James, calling her a
“Trump-hater”. ABC’s Dan Abrams calls
the case “more perilous than some of the criminal cases.” National prosecutors, having scrutinized
Tik Tok for Communist Chinese influence is now pondering the monopolistic
practices of Amazon. And North Korea gives up and finally kicks
out the disturbed and defecting American soldier, with a little help from
China and Sweden. They were so glad to
be rid of him, they didn’t even ask for ransom! |
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Thursday, September 28, 2023 Dow:
33,666.34 |
The Harvest Moon is shining on... and
shining down on Simi Valley’s seven G.O.P. debaters who wheezed and trumpeted
and pretended Trump was not on their minds in their “loud and chaotic” race
to be Number Two. Chris Christie
called him “Donald Duck” while Disney-hating Ron DeSantis was called
“improved”, Nikki Haley shouted at former BFF Scott and Tik Tok Rama. Mike Pence was there. So was Doug Burgum – but nobody cared. (See above)
Congress staggers and stumbles back to work – not on the budget, but
on impeaching President Joe for the sins of his son even they had no
evidence, just “hoped to find some.”
K-Mac reluctantly leads his force of fools for fear of being “vacated”
as Speaker. Biden retaliates with a
speech praising himself and denouncing “extremism”.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the Golden Senator with his suit full of
cash and Egyptian gold bars denies he did anything wrong, so the Senate (by a
vote of 67-0) censures John Fetterman (D-Pa) and orders him to wear a suit
while he legislates. |
|
|
Friday, September 29, 2023 Dow:
33,507.50 |
It’s National Coffee Day and amped-up Congress
continues looking for reasons to impeach President Joe and seems resigned to
a long, long shutdown even though Senate Minority Leader Mitchy warns them
that not paying the border agents and ICE will only make the immigration
crisis worse. In
other news, as above, the UAW extends its strike to trucks and tractors, the
WGA to videogames while the WGA goes back to writing jokes for the late night
comedians to make fun of it all. Sen.
Dianne Feinstein dies, leaving succession up to Gov. Newsome (D-Ca) who
raises the minimum wage of restaurant workers to $20/hr. to cover all the
rents DiFi helped raise. Inflation
also hits mortgages, gas and Girl Scout cookies.
And a series of storms over the Northeast drops eight inches of rain,
flooding subways in New York City, closing airports and highways. Clumsy tropical storms Philippe and Rina
collide with one another instead of making landfall, leading inquiring minds
to ask: “Where was the Q-storm?”
Retiring Joint Chief Mark Milley makes his farewell speech, denouncing
tyrants and dictators and a certain unnamed “wannabe dictator”. No, he’s not running for President. Yet... |
|
|
Saturday, September 30, 2023 Dow:
(Closed) |
Friends, foes and even a few Republicans who, at least, credit him for
the rise of Ronald Reagan after the failed military mission in Iran, paid
tribute to former President Jimmy Carter as he celebrated his 99th
birthday a day early owing to the prospects of his Presidential Library being
shut down. In a final farrago of fear
before the Eleventh Hour, the fearmerchers spun disaster scenarios to chill
the soul and drive the body to stock up on provisions at the local WalMart in
advance of Apocalypse. But in reality, it was Don
Jones’ old friends – bad weather, labor strife and inflation – that ruled
breakfast table conversations (among, at least, those who could still afford
breakfast). The news wasn’t all
bad... the Mississippi Valley will get a lot of needed rain, probably not as
much as flooded New York. 7,000 more
UAW strikers hit repair supply shops (so Americans who can’t find new cars
can’t even fix their old ones) and gas prices keep rocketing upwards. And then, at 11:15 PM,
President Joe signed the “continuing resolution” deal to postpone the
government shutdown for a few more weeks... |
|
|
Sunday, October 1, 2023 Dow:
(Closed) |
...saving the military and numerous civilian agencie with the
backstabbed far-right Republicans focusing on revenge against turncoat
K-Mac. Asked about McCarthy’s future,
Rep.Troy N@ blew cigar smoke in the intervier’s face and then said, simply,
“I’m a No!” The Sunday talkshows split between the shutdown shutdown and last
week’s debate. ABC’s “This Week”
brought Gaetz himself to the Show where he vowed vengeance. ABC’s “This Week” tabbed Gaetz himself to double down on his threats
of bloody revenge as well as former Speaker Pelosi, AOC and many other
Democrats said that, while they appreciated his efforts to keep the
government open, they felt no particular obligation to McCarthy and would, so
to speak, let the chips (like Chip Roy) fall where they may and sit back,
watching the Republicans implode.
Enough may yet save him one or two times, and some fed-up pachyderms
like Mike Lawler (R-NY) condemn the Floridian’s “diatribes of delusional
thinking”. but the Speakership deal allows one disgruntled elephant to move to remove – even if every day. And “I am relentless!” Gaetz swore. And nobody wins Saturday night’s Powerball, so the pot rises to over a
billion as millions of delusional thinkers lay their money down. |
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The Fed might be happy about the continuing
rise in unemployment, but Don Jones isn’t.
At least he was not one of the four million whose income was cut off
by the politicians. |
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CHART of CATEGORIES
w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000 (REFLECTING… approximately…
DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013) See a further explanation
of categories here… ECONOMIC INDICES (60%)
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SOCIAL
INDICES (40%) |
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ACTS of MAN |
12% |
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World Affairs |
3% |
450 |
9/25/23 |
-0.2% |
10/9/23 |
452.55 |
451.64 |
Gawkers and gapers go gaga over news of expulsion of
feckless American soldier from his NoKo sanctuary. (He faces “Administrative discharge”, not a
trial for treason!) Euroskeptics,
others marvel at the cupidity and stupidity of politicians in the U.S.A. |
|||
|
War and terrorism |
2% |
300 |
9/25/23 |
-0.3% |
10/9/23 |
292.30 |
291.42 |
Gumment shutdown deal backstabs Zelenskyy as polls
show that a majority of Americans no longer support aid to Ukraine. Go, Vlad!
Hot and cold Armenia/ Azeri war heats up as Turkish mercenaries rout
100,000 civilians in what is called “ethnic cleansing” as Kurdish terrorists
strike Ankara itself. Maniac targets
monks at a monastery in Kosovo and a @school in the Netherlands. Border agents say migrants and smugglers
are plotting to introduce “bad actors” into America. Americans capture an Islamic bad actor in
Syria, |
|||
|
Politics |
3% |
450 |
9/25/23 |
+1.2% |
10/9/23 |
478.57 |
484.31 |
Eleventh hour (actually 11:15) Saturday night
showdown averted as K-Mac resorts to Democratic votes. Republicans talk it up in Simi Valley while
Biden and Trump do Detroit and, with
the budget can kicked until November 17th the House goes back to his day job:
impeaching President Joe. Four million
soldiers, border agents and others exhale in relief |
|||
|
Economics |
3% |
450 |
9/25/23 |
+0.2% |
10/9/23 |
426.61 |
427.46 |
One strike down (WGA), two ongoing (UAW and SAG) and
another upcoming im what could be a massive walkout of hospital workers. Gov. Gavin Newsome (D-Ca) either saves or
destroys small eateries by raising minwage to $20/hr. Inflation hitting Halloweek candy, costumes
and pumpkins. Survey finds 60% of
Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and despite the shutdown settlement,
life will get worse for working mothers with children and student debtors. |
|||
|
Crime |
1% |
150 |
9/25/23 |
-0.4% |
10/9/23 |
248.99 |
247.99 |
Gun criminals include Family Dollar employees shooting
it out in @, murderer of three year old in @.
Another three year old stabbed to death by former basketball star who
claims “self defense” and a third, also three, accidentally shot in Georgia
with the family’s unsafe gun. Prisoner
kills guard with “unknown object, combo Driver/Stabber stabs five cops after
crashing his car into a house, parolee rams parole agents with his car while evil Kansan Robin Hoodlum
attacks with bow and arrow. |
|||
|
ACTS of GOD |
(6%) |
|
|
||||||||
|
Environment/Weather |
3% |
450 |
9/25/23 |
+0.1% |
10/9/23 |
398.20 |
398.60 |
Ophelia departs the East Cost weeping torrents of
rain. Climatologists noting, if not
celebrating, the first anniversary of Cat. Five Irene@ who killed over a
hundred, causing billions in damage.
Welcome rain for the Mississippi Vally, unwelcome flooding for New
York City. |
|||
|
Disasters |
3% |
450 |
9/25/23 |
-0.3% |
10/9/23 |
425.53 |
424.25 |
As above, budget disaster averted (except for
Ukrainians). Tanker crash kills five
with ammonia clouds in Teutopolis, Illinois. Six die as train his SUV in
Florida. |
|||
|
LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX |
(15%) |
|
|
||||||||
|
Science, Tech, Educ. |
4% |
600 |
9/25/23 |
+0.3% |
10/9/23 |
634.14 |
636.04 |
Space capsule returns to Utah with asteroid
debris. ISS astronaut Frank Rubio
returns to Earth on a Russian rocket after more than a year. AI experts reduce NFL playets to Toy Story
cartoons on a Sunday morning in London. |
|||
|
Equality (econ/social) |
4% |
600 |
9/25/23 |
+0.5% |
10/9/23 |
627.97 |
631.11 |
First black President of Harvard appointed as is a
black, gay, female threefer to replace Dianne Feinstein. Dreamers (immigrant) fear Rama’s Republican
plot to deport children of illegals, Dreamers (NFL) tout Colin Kaepernik as a
replacement for injured Jet Aaron Rodgers.
Gymnast Simone Biles does maneuver so complex that it will henceforth
be named after her. |
|||
|
Health |
4% |
600 |
9/25/23 |
-0.1% |
10/9/23 |
472.49 |
472.02 |
CDC says 7% of Americans have Long Covid. Fake Internet weight loss pills are
proliferating. Recalls include baby
strollers that strangle, cantaloupes with E Coli. Doctors say smoking marijuana causes heart
attacks and strokes... time to bring back those thirty years in the joint for
one joint prosecutions? (There’s a
fentanyl crisis, too, but the only response seems to be denouncing
China.) But they also say drinking
coffee cures cancer and dementia. |
|||
|
Freedom and Justice |
3% |
450 |
9/25/23 |
+0.1% |
10/9/23 |
468.69 |
469.16 |
Suspect in Tupac Shakur arrested thirty years after
the fact. Killer of tech exec in
Baltimore had been freed after serving only 8 years of his 30 year term for previous murders. Georgia election fraudster Scott Hall gets
no jail time for deal to rat out President Trump. Woman in Wyoming gets 5 years for abortion.
Texas judge re-legalizes drag shows, @ judge cancels conservatorship of NFL’s
Michael Oher after adoptive parents accused of looting his earnings and The
Donald says he will appear at Monday’s civil fraud trial that could cost him
Trump Tower. |
|||
|
MISCELLANEOUS and TRANSIENT INDEX |
(7%) |
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Cultural incidents |
3% |
450 |
9/25/23 |
+0.2% |
10/9/23 |
503.91 |
504.92 |
Talking Head David Byrne, DJ Fatboy Slim and many
Filipinos hit Broadway in a show about disco dictator Imelda Marcos and her
shoes while Ms. Swift and an army of celebs (including the Wolverine) visit
Kelcy again at the KC/Jets game and a new buzzword manifests: Traylor (will
obsessive fanthings become “Traylor Trash?”) RIP fake Russian
from UNCLE David McCallum, Michael (“Dumbledore”) Gambon, golden glover Brooks
Robinson, knuckleballer Tim Wakefield.
RIP too for Sen. Diane
Feinstein... some say – tho’ renters she kicked out of San Francisco say
RIH. Health problems for Bruce
Springsteen (ulcers) and Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler (strained vocal chords) deep
six their concert tours and RaH (rest and health) to Sophia Loren (broken
bones in fall) and 99’er Jimmy Carter. |
|||
|
Misc. incidents |
4% |
450 |
9/25/23 |
nc |
10/9/23 |
485.72 |
485.72 |
Say aloha to Netflix mailing out those red disks
(too many people switching to streaming) and to the bankrupt Archdiocse of
Baltimore (pervo priests). Some may
have to give up Girl Scout Cookies too due to inflation. BeagleFest celebrates first anniversary of
rescue of 4,000 Snoopies from evil puppy mill. The answer to the question: “Who wants to
be a billionaire?” is “nobody” as Powerball rolls over. |
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
The Don Jones
Index for the week of September 25th through October 1st, 2023 was DOWN 29.98 points
The Don Jones
Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman
and Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian
Doohan, Administrator. The CNC denies,
emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers
(including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin
Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works,
“Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best,
mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective
legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.
Comments,
complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com.
ATTACHMENT
ONE – From USA Today
LIVE UPDATES: IS A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN GOING TO HAPPEN? HOW DOES IT
AFFECT YOU? WHAT TO KNOW
By Candy Woodall, Rachel Looker, Savannah Kuchar. Sudiksha Kochi and Marina Pitofsky
WASHINGTON−The U.S. is two
days away from a shutdown − a situation moving from possible to
likely as Congress has failed to cut through gridlock and reach a deal to fund
the federal government.
Millions of Americans will be impacted if lawmakers can't
reach a deal before 12:01 a.m. Oct. 1.
A shutdown would impact the country's largest food
assistance programs, federally funded preschool, federal college grants and
loans, food safety inspections, national parks and more.
Here's the latest news on where
things stand with the looming government shutdown, why it matters and how it
impacts you and your family.
Takeaways:
a A
government shutdown takes place when Congress is unable to pass a dozen annual
spending bills that funnel money to government programs and agencies.
A shutdown is
likely when both chambers in Congress − the House and Senate −
can’t come to an agreement on how much money to allocate to certain agencies or
agree on certain spending provisions, putting federal agencies at risk. A
partial government shutdown can occur if Congress is able to pass any of the 12
individual spending bills.
When both
chambers can't reach a compromise, funding levels expire and federal agencies
must cease all non-essential function.
−Rachel
Looker
b Do national parks close during a government
shutdown?
It depends on
the park. During previous shutdowns, some national parks closed entirely, while
others remained technically open but without staff to maintain them
Some fell
into disarray, with trash piling up and toilets overflowing.
But some park
service employees, such as emergency medical personnel, would still be on the
job during a government shutdown. However, services could be disrupted.
– Zach
Wichter and Nathan Diller
c House Dem Leader: House GOP would ‘own this
government shutdown’
House
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., warned House Speaker Kevin McCarthy,
R-Calif., that House Democrats would not support a Republican-crafted stopgap
measure if it was put on the floor, instead urging him to hold a vote on the
Senate’s bipartisan version of a continuing resolution to keep the government
open.
“There is a
bipartisan agreement that meets the needs of the American people that would
keep the government open that is working its way through the Senate,” Jeffries
said at a weekly press conference Thursday.
Jeffries
praised the Senate version of the bill, which is “free from any extreme policy
partisan poison pill” provisions and includes President Joe Biden’s request for
additional U.S. aid to Ukraine and disaster relief funding.
If Congress
can’t pass a funding deal by the Sept. 30 deadline, Jeffries said House
Republicans would “own this government shutdown.”
−Ken
Tran
d What is the deadline for the government
shutdown?
The U.S.
government will shut down at 12:01 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 1 if lawmakers don't pass
a continuing resolution or a federal budget by Sept. 30.
The
continuing resolution, a stopgap measure that would temporarily fund the
government while lawmakers work to pass a comprehensive budget, would prevent a
shutdown from occurring on Oct. 1.
Speaker Kevin
McCarthy, R-Calif., said the House will vote Friday on a continuing resolution,
but it's unclear if it has enough votes to pass.
−Sudiksha
Kochi
e ‘Our national security depends on it’
Sen. Ben
Cardin, D-Md., who now chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after
twice-indicted Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., stepped down, said Thursday morning
there are thousands of examples of how a government shutdown affects the
readiness of the country.
“This is
absolutely dangerous, reckless and ridiculous that we can’t keep government
open,” he said.
Cardin called
on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy R-Calif., to garner bipartisan support in the
House and live up to the commitment the House Speaker made with President Joe Biden
during debt ceiling negotiations.
“You can’t
let the extremes control the operations in the House,” he said. “Our national
security depends upon it as well as the inconvenience of costing the American
taxpayer.”
In one
example, Cardin said a shutdown would affect the civilian faculty at the U.S.
Naval Academy located in Maryland. If a shutdown goes on for any length of
time, Cardin said the midshipmen will not be able to complete the accredited
number of courses they need in time.
‘This is just
one example affecting the readiness of our nation,” he said.
−Rachel
Looker
f Will Social Security be paid if there is a
government shutdown?
Social
Security recipients will continue to receive checks in
the event of a government shutdown and Medicare benefits will not be
interrupted.
However, employees
in the Social Security Administration are likely to be furloughed and
government food assistance benefits could see delay.
A few
services that are not directly related to Social
Security payment benefits and direct-service operations would be temporarily
suspended.
− Marina
Pitofsky and Sudiksha Kochi
g Are state employees affected by a government
shutdown?
A
shutdown could impact state employees whose
employers depend on federal funds to operate and must shut down certain
activities that the government has deemed non-necessary.
In this case,
certain state employees could be furloughed until a shutdown passes.
But state
employees who receive salaries from private employers who do not rely on
federal funds wouldn’t necessarily be impacted.
-Sudiksha
Kochi
h Updates on government shutdown: What to
expect today
The House is scrambling,
working minute by minute, hour by hour, to pass spending bills. Today's
schedule includes procedural votes on amendments and four spending bills that
would fund Homeland Security, Agriculture, Defense and Agriculture and
State-Foreign Operations.
Even if all
four spending bills pass, the lower chamber still needs to work through its
disagreements on each bill with the Senate. And there are less than 100 hours
before the government shuts down.
Senators are
focusing on their continuing resolution, a temporary funding measure that has
garnered bipartisan support and would avert a shutdown. The upper chamber will
hold a procedural vote this morning to advance their continuing resolution,
which is tied to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill.
House
lawmakers have yet to vote on their version of a continuing resolution−a
procedural move that has strong opposition from ultraconservatives in the
Republican caucus.
Senate
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Thursday morning the Senate will
vote on their version of a stopgap measure Saturday, hours before the deadline
to avert a shutdown.
- Rachel
Looker
i What closes during a government
shutdown?
All
“non-essential” federal agencies will have to stop operations in a government
shutdown, including the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety inspections,
Environmental Protection Agency inspections and disaster relief by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency.
Programs like
Head Start for preschoolers and the nation's food aid would also lose funding
and come to a halt.
National
parks could close, and the Smithsonian museums and National Zoo in Washington,
D.C. said they would stay open as long as funding allows.
−Savannah
Kuchar
j What does a government shutdown mean for
Medicare?
Medicare
benefits will continue, though there could be a delay in some payments.
The benefits
are considered among essential services, along with air travel, Amtrak, Social
Security payments and more.
-Candy
Woodall
k Where do things stand right now?
There are two
days until funding levels expire and the House has not made any significant
progress in averting a government shutdown.
Lawmakers in
the lower chamber held procedural votes last night that advanced four separate
spending bills, but it did not bring them any closer to averting a shutdown.
Even if the lower chamber passes individual spending bills this evening,
lawmakers still need to reconcile with the Senate for both chambers to pass a
bill— which is becoming more and more unlikely by the hour.
Top
Republicans—including ultraconservatives in the Republican caucus—have also
rejected a stopgap measure introduced in the Senate that would extend current
funding levels through Nov. 17. A stopgap measure may be the best bet for
lawmakers to avert a shutdown as the clock ticks.
−Rachel
Looker
l What was the longest government shutdown in
U.S. history?
The longest government shutdown lasted for 35 days from
late 2018 to early 2019 under the Trump administration. It went into effect after
the House and Senate failed to reach a compromise on a short-term funding plan
to keep the government running through early next year.
The critical
issue was that Senate Democrats opposed President Donald Trump’s $5.7 billion request
for building a wall on the southern border.
Before that,
the longest government shutdown lasted from Dec. 5, 1995, to Jan. 6, 1996,
when Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Democratic President Bill
Clinton faced off over taxes.
- Sudiksha
Kochi and John Fritze
m How long was the last government shutdown?
The last government shutdown lasted from Dec. 22, 2018 to Jan. 25, 2019. Spanning 35
days, it was the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
It was also
the third federal shutdown to occur during the Trump administration; the
first lasted three days in
January 2018, and the second lasted only a few hours in February 2018.
−Olivia
Munson
n List of government shutdowns
Over the last
five decades, there have been 21 federal shutdowns:
·
1976: Under
President Gerald Ford. Lasted for 11 days.
·
1977: Under
President Jimmy Carter. Lasted 12 days.
·
1977: Under
President Carter. Lasted eight days.
·
1977: Under
President Carter. Lasted eight days.
·
1978: Under
President Carter. Lasted 17 days.
·
1979: Under
President Carter. Lasted 11 days.
·
1981: Under
President Ronald Reagan. Lasted two days.
·
1982: Under
President Reagan. Lasted one day.
·
1982: Under
President Reagan. Lasted three days.
·
1983: Under
President Reagan. Lasted three days.
·
1984: Under
President Reagan. Lasted two days.
·
1984: Under
President Reagan. Lasted one day.
·
1986: Under
President Reagan. Lasted one day.
·
1987: Under
President Reagan. Lasted one day.
·
1990: Under
George H.W. Bush. Lasted four days.
·
1995: Under
President Bill Clinton. Lasted five days.
·
1996: Under
President Clinton. Lasted 21 days.
·
2013: Under
President Barack Obama. Lasted 17 days.
·
2018: Under
President Donald Trump. Lasted three days.
·
2018: Under
President Trump. Lasted several hours.
·
2019: Under
Trump. Lasted 35 days.
-Olivia
Munson
o Jimmy Carter’s birthday party moved because
of possible government shutdown
Former
President Jimmy Carter’s 99th birthday celebration was moved from Sunday, Oct. 1 - his
actual birthday - to Saturday, Sept. 30, amid the possibility of a government
shutdown, according to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.
“We want to make
sure we are celebrating regardless of what Congress does,” Tony Clark, the
site’s public affairs director told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
If the
shutdown does not occur, the museum will have another round of festivities on
Sunday for visitors.
−Saman
Shafiq and Sudiksha Kochi
p What are essential workers?
Only
employees for “essential” government services, generally related to public
safety, are able to continue working during a shutdown. This includes air
traffic controllers, national security agents and more.
These workers
will go without a paycheck for the duration of a shutdown and receive backpay for their time on the job
at its conclusion.
Meanwhile, many
employees of “non-essential” federal agencies, such as NASA or national parks,
will be furloughed.
−Savannah
Kuchar
q How a government shutdown affects you
Millions of
Americans would be impacted by a government shutdown.
Federal
workers would be furloughed without pay. "Essential" federal workers,
such as those who work for the Federal Aviation Administration, would work
without pay − but would receive backpay once a shutdown ends. Numerous subcontractors would be out of work and would
not receive backpay.
The impact
would stretch far beyond federal workers though. It would also be felt in
millions of homes across America.
Here are some
ways a government shutdown would impact your family:
·
Funding for
WIC − the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and
Children − would stop immediately
·
Food stamp
benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would remain
intact in October but could be impacted after that
·
Children from
low-income families would lose access to Head Start preschool programs
·
College
students could see delays in their student loans
·
The Food and
Drug Administration would delay nonessential food safety inspections
·
The
Occupational Safety and Health Administration would limit its work
·
Travelers could
see delays with receiving passports
·
National
parks could close
·
The Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would have no money for disaster relief
−Candy
Woodall
r Is there going to be a government shutdown?
The U.S.
government will shut down at 12:01 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 1 if lawmakers don't pass
a continuing resolution or a federal budget by Sept. 30.
The
continuing resolution, a stopgap measure that would temporarily fund the
government while lawmakers work to pass a comprehensive budget, would prevent a
shutdown from occurring on Oct. 1.
Speaker Kevin
McCarthy, R-Calif., said the House will vote Friday on a continuing resolution,
but it's unclear if it has enough votes to pass.
−Sudiksha
Kochi
s What happens when the government shuts down?
A government shutdown means all federal agencies and
services officials don’t deem “essential” have to stop their work and close
their doors.
Some of those
essential services include the U.S. Postal Service delivering mail and people
receiving Medicare and Social Security benefits. Those will continue whether or
not the government shuts down.
But so-called
“non-essential” work can still have significant impacts for federal employees
and Americans across the country. Thousands of federal workers would be
furloughed, government food assistance benefits could be delayed and some food
safety inspections could also be put on pause.
– Marina
Pitofsky
t Will a government shutdown affect air
travel?
The deepest
impact would not be on your flight or cruise.
Funding to agencies
like the Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Security
Administration and Customs and Border Protection would be on hold. However, the agents who you typically
interact with at airports and seaports, and the controllers who oversee your
flights are considered essential and will be working without pay during the
shutdown.
Impacts on
those agencies have more to do with things like hiring and training. All the
crucial safety functions like inspections and air traffic control continue.
Consular operations
in the U.S. and internationally will also continue normally “as long as there
are sufficient fees” collected to support them, according to the most recent guidance from the State Department. “This
includes passports, visas, and assisting U.S. citizens abroad.”
There could be economic
repercussions, though. A government shutdown is estimated to cost the country's
travel economy as much as $140 million per day, according to an analysis for the U.S. Travel Association.
− Zach Wichter and Nathan
Diller
ATTACHMENT
TWO – From Time
VOTERS MAY BLAME REPUBLICANS FOR A SHUTDOWN—BUT NOT PUNISH THEM
It’s impossible to go more than 10
minutes on cable news or even one scroll on social media right now without
confronting some version of the same argument: that the government shutdown
provisionally slated to start this weekend
is the fault of Republicans and voters will remember it. Republicans
seemed resigned to being the heavies
for a complete surrender of the political high road, and Democrats—perhaps
over-confidently—think this is all gravy for
them.
This all has echoes of a decade
ago, almost to the day, when lawmakers in Washington stood ready to shut down
the federal government in hopes of torpedoing the Affordable Care
Act, A.K.A. Obamacare. And just like back then, Virginia’s off-year elections
are just a few weeks away, and the shutdown may be heavy on voters’ minds when
they go to the polls.
The legend in Washington has been
that the 2013 shutdown delivered Virginia Democrats a blowout. Yet the history
is not as clear-cut as the rhetoric would suggest. In fact, it might give
Republicans in nearby Washington justified reasons to barrel forward on the
haphazard path they are already on.
Just like now, Congress back then
was split between a Republican-led House and a Democratic-led Senate where
Democrats lacked the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Heading toward
shutdown, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who often seemed more focused on setting up
his bid for president than governing, read Green Eggs and Ham on the
Senate floor as part of his 21-hour effort to delay any dealmaking. (For the
historical record, it was not technically even a filibuster
because that day’s legislative business was already over and Cruz was blocking no live votes.
Serious mainstream Republicans rolled their eyes in disbelief.)
The shutdown lasted for 16 days.
At its peak, 850,000 workers stayed home
and another million had to report to work while hoping they’d get back pay at
some point. Per one estimate, the U.S. economy lost a whopping $24 billion. Cruz and Co.’s long-shot hopes that closing national
parks and not collecting owed taxes would drive Obama to pull a U-turn on the
central piece of his legacy never materialized. Even the leaders at the time admit today that it was a
bungle.
This time we are not likely to be
so lucky as to suffer through just a partial shutdown. Not one of the 12
must-pass spending bills is finished, and that includes the typically
easy-peasy defense and foreign operations spending bills. The troublemakers are getting
their turn in the spotlight and
those accustomed to power are finding they have less than they imagined.
Pollsters are quietly warning that Republicans’ standing in Gallup is exactly where it was right before the
2013 shutdown, at 38% favorable. When the 2013 shutdown began, the GOP’s
favorability plummeted a full 10 points to
28%, the lowest number on record for either party to that point since Gallup
started asking the question in 1992.
This is where Virginia comes in,
as its Nov. 7 election is looming large in the minds of those looking for clues
as to which party is better positioned going into 2024.
Virginia Republicans head into
Election Day with a three-seat majority in the
House of Delegates and Democrats enjoy a four-seat majority in the Senate—meaning small
margins matter, not just for Virginians but for national strategists looking
for lessons from a shutdown.
A decade ago, then-Gov. Bob
McDonnell was coming off a chance to become 2012 Republican presidential
nominee Mitt Romney’s running mate and was clear-eyed about both his political
future and what the legacy cost would be for a messy off-year election that
historically punishes the party that won the White House the year before.
“My Republican friends have got to
understand there’s no way on earth that the President and the United States
Senate are going to vote to defund Obamacare,” McDonnell told reporters in Richmond,
Va., ahead of the shutdown. “Look, I am no fan at all of Obamacare. ... But it
is absolutely wrong to shut down the government.”
Contrast that now, with Virginia
Gov. Glenn Youngkin trying to split the difference: blaming
President Joe Biden for a lack of leadership and urging patience as fellow
Republicans sort out their internal differences. Here is another
Virginian considering the national
stage, and he knows the base of the party won’t easily tolerate full-throated
dissent against those intent on forcing a shutdown, even if they don’t have any
specific demands.
Outside of D.C., Virginia trails
only California in the number of federal jobs, and the state’s military
bases employ 130,000 active-duty
personnel and another almost 26,000 reservists, putting it behind only
California and Texas in the number of men and women in uniform. Add in all of
D.C.’s federal workers who commute from Virginia, and you can see why the
shutdown would be felt there more strongly than other states.
In popular lore, Virginia’s 2013
election shifted over the shutdown. The Democratic nominee for Governor, Terry
McAuliffe, was polling 5 points ahead of
Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP’s nominee for the top gig,
on the final days before the shutdown. By the time the shutdown had ended, the
same pollsters at Roanoke College had McAuliffe up 15 points. Cuccinelli went
all-in on holding the conservative line and lost by 2.5 points.
Wait, 2.5 points? Wasn’t Virginia
supposed to be a Democratic blow-out because of the
shutdown? Apparently not. Even in the state legislature, Republicans held steady at 67
seats in the 100-seat House of Delegates.
It was an early sign that anger
over a largely pointless shutdown is not destined to necessarily last long.
Nationally, House Republicans picked up 13 net seats in the 2014
midterms and Senate Republicans picked up nine, just one year after the lights
went back on and Cruz shelved Dr. Seuss.
All of which is to say: voters today
may be rightly blaming Republicans for the looming shutdown that seems as
stupid as it is unavoidable. But memories are short in politics, a new outrage
is always around the corner, and even immediate consequences, like the one in
Virginia back in 2013, can ignore national trends as long as there’s a stronger
competing story. Doubt it? Look at how much money is being spent in Virginia on
ads about abortion. It’s that potent issue,
and not appropriations, that both parties think can win them these state
legislative races. Party elders on both sides of the aisle will be watching
closely for signs that their thinking on that is right over the next month—and
maybe the year that follows.
ATTACHMENT
THREE – From Fact Check.orgFollow
Q&A ON LOOMING GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN
By Lori Robertson
The federal government is heading
to a shutdown, if Congress doesn’t pass funding legislation by the time the
clock strikes midnight on Sept. 30. We’ll explain what that means and what government
services could be affected.
What is a
government shutdown?
Each year, Congress must
pass 12 appropriations bills or a temporary funding bill —
known as a continuing resolution, or CR — to fund the federal government. The
federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30, so Congress has until midnight on that date
to pass the spending bills or a CR.
As of Sept. 26, Congress hasn’t passed any appropriations bills for
fiscal year 2024, which starts on Oct. 1, and it hasn’t been able to agree on a
stop-gap funding bill to buy itself some time.
The U.S. Constitution — Article 1, Section 9, clause 7 — states:
“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of
Appropriations made by Law.” If no law is passed, a government shutdown or
partial shutdown will occur on Oct. 1. (A partial shutdown happens when some,
but not all, of the appropriations bills become law, as explained by
the Congressional Research Service.)
Without approved funding, federal
agencies must enact contingency plans to operate on a limited
basis — such as requiring some essential employees to work without pay for the
duration of the shutdown. (More on that later.)
There have been 20 “funding gaps”
of at least one day since 1977, with the last and longest one occurring for 34
days in 2019, according to the Office of the Historian
in the U.S. House.
Why might
there be a government shutdown?
In the spring, House Speaker Kevin
McCarthy and President Joe Biden agreed on compromise legislation — the Fiscal
Responsibility Act — that raised the debt limit and imposed caps on spending
for fiscal years 2024 and 2025. The House approved the bill 314
to 117 on May 31, and the Senate approved it a day later 63 to 36. Biden signed it
into law on June 3. (See our article “Debt Limit Agreement Breakdown.”)
Although the legislation received
broad support in both chambers, a group of House conservatives strongly opposed the deal and criticized McCarthy
for agreeing to it. Some of those same Republicans are now blocking McCarthy’s
attempts to pass appropriations bills and threatening to remove him as speaker if he
moves spending bills through the House without their support.
In order to pass spending bills,
McCarthy cannot afford to lose more than four Republicans because the
Republicans have such a narrow majority — 221 to 212 — in
the House. Last week, a small band of conservatives forced
McCarthy to pull a stop-gap spending bill and blocked
two attempts to pass a defense spending bill by votes of 212-214 and 212-216.
In both cases, no Democrats voted for the bill, leaving McCarthy to rely only
on Republican votes. Democrats voted against the GOP-crafted defense bill
because it includes spending cuts and language they oppose on
such issues as climate change, reproductive rights and health care for
transgender service members.
McCarthy is scheduled to
take up four spending bills (defense, homeland security, state and agriculture)
before Oct. 1, but the outcome again is uncertain.
Any spending bill that passes the
House with only Republican support would likely fail in the
Democratic-controlled Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and
Republican leaders are working on a bipartisan short-term continuing resolution that
would temporarily fund the government.
The Senate is scheduled on
Sept. 26 to begin debate on a Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization
bill that Schumer plans to use as the vehicle for a
continuing resolution that would prevent a government shutdown and give
Congress more time to negotiate a compromise.
But whether McCarthy would put the
Senate bill up for a floor vote in the House is uncertain, and, if he does, he
likely will need Democratic support to pass it.
Former President Donald Trump, the
presumed front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has urged Republicans to “SHUT IT DOWN” if
they don’t “GET EVERYTHING” they want.
What impact
does a shutdown have on federal workers?
During a shutdown, most federal
workers are divided into two categories: furloughed, meaning they do not
report to work; and excepted, which includes workers who are deemed to be
essential and must continue working even during a shutdown. Excepted workers
include those whose jobs involve the safety of human life or
protection of property, such as air traffic controllers and law enforcement officers.
Federal agencies create contingency plans that spell out which
workers fall into the two categories.
During a shutdown in 2013,
about 850,000 federal
workers were furloughed. In a 2019 shutdown, about 800,000 of the 2.1 million
civilian federal employees were furloughed, the Federal News Network reported.
All of those workers will be paid,
eventually, but not during the shutdown. According to the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act which
became law in 2019, whether an employee is furloughed or required to work
during a shutdown, the employees must be compensated “at the earliest date possible
after the lapse in appropriations ends.”
Congress is paid during a
shutdown. On Sept. 20, Democratic Rep. Angie Craig introduced legislation — the My Constituents Cannot
Afford Rebellious Tantrums, Handle Your Shutdown Act, or MCCARTHY Shutdown Act
— that seeks to temporarily block pay for members of Congress commensurate with
the number of days a shutdown lasts. But the bill is unlikely to pass.
What
government services would be affected by a shutdown?
A lot of government services will
continue uninterrupted, but other services, particularly nonessential ones,
will cease completely or will only be offered in a limited capacity.
For specifics, visit the Office of Management and Budget’s page with
each agency’s most recent contingency plan, which department heads are supposed
to submit
for review by Aug. 1 in odd-numbered years. Some of the plans
include a summary of federal agency activities or services that would stop
during a funding lapse.
For example, the Social Security
Administration’s 2023 plan says the agency “will cease
activities not directly related to the accurate and timely payment of benefits
or not critical to our direct-service operations.” Affected services would
include benefit verification, which is documentation
provided to show an individual receives, has never received, or has applied for
Social Security, Supplemental Security Income or Medicare.
In addition, Medicare
beneficiaries would not be able to get replacement cards through the Social
Security Administration, the contingency plan states.
Also, District of Columbia courts would
not issue marriage licenses or perform ceremonies, according to this year’s shutdown plan.
And the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights advises that “the public will be unable to
submit complaints alleging denial of civil rights because of color, race,
religion, sex, age, disability, national origin, or in the administrative of
justice.”
It’s unclear, for now, what would
happen at the hundreds of U.S. national parks, which
were affected in prior shutdowns. An updated plan from the National Park
Service is not yet available, at least not publicly.
According to a Congressional Research Service
report updated on Sept. 22, during the 2018-2019 shutdown, “The
majority of parks — including units such as Yellowstone National Park, Grand
Canyon National Park, Yosemite National Park, the Statue of Liberty National
Memorial, and the National Mall in Washington, DC — remained at least partially
accessible to visitors throughout the shutdown, with varying levels of services
and law enforcement.” The report noted that the NPS contingency plan from January 2019 said “no visitor services”
would be available during a shutdown, although “park roads, lookouts, trails,
and open-air memorials will generally remain accessible to visitors.”
The National Zoo and other
Smithsonian Institution museums would be closed to the public during a
shutdown, according to the Smithsonian’s guidance.
What about Social
Security checks and other direct benefits?
Social Security checks will
continue to be issued during a government shutdown. That’s because Social
Security benefits are part of mandatory spending, which, unlike discretionary
spending, doesn’t need to be appropriated annually, as the nonprofit Committee
for a Responsible Federal Budget explained in a Sept. 5 article.
But some aspects of mandatory
programs could be subject to discretionary spending and therefore affected. As
we noted above, benefit verification services will cease.
Mandatory
programs also include Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment
compensation, some nutrition programs, veterans’ benefits, retirement benefits
for government employees, Supplemental
Security Income (for people with disabilities and seniors), and
student loans.
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program, or SNAP, benefits — formerly known as food stamps — are part of
mandatory spending. However, CRFB noted that a shutdown could affect the
issuance of benefits over time, “since continuing resolutions have generally
only authorized the Agriculture Department (USDA) to send out benefits for 30
days after a shutdown begins.” And “stores are not able to renew their
Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card licenses, so those whose licenses expire
would not be able to accept SNAP benefits during a shutdown,” CRFB said.
Also potentially at risk during a
shutdown: Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants,
and Children, or WIC, which is considered a permanent program
but has been funded by discretionary spending
since fiscal 2016. The program provides food, breastfeeding support and
nutritional services to low-income pregnant, breastfeeding and postpartum
women, as well as kids up to age 5 who are at nutritional risk.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom
Vilsack said on Sept. 25 that there is a USDA
contingency fund that could continue WIC “for a day or two,” and some states
might have unspent funds that “could extend it for a week or so in that state.”
But after that, he said, the nutritional assistance would cease. The
program provided benefits to a monthly average of
6.3 million people in 2022.
However, the USDA’s 2021 contingency plan said that WIC, and
other core nutrition programs, would “continue operations during a lapse in
appropriations” using money such as “multi-year carry over funds,” “contingency
reserves” and funds “apportioned by OMB to support program operations during
the period of the lapse.”
What other
government services would not be affected?
As we said, federal workers who
are deemed to be essential must continue working, so the services they provide
will continue. While those employees won’t be paid for their work during the
shutdown until it’s over, CRFB said that “border protection, in-hospital
medical care, air traffic control, law enforcement, and power grid maintenance
have been among the services classified as essential” and “some legislative and
judicial staff have also been largely protected.”
Still, the fact that employees
aren’t getting a paycheck during the shutdown could have some effect. In the
2018-2019 shutdown, some Transportation Security Administration agents didn’t
work, leading to long lines at airport security, and 10 air traffic controllers
didn’t report to work, halting travel at LaGuardia Airport and causing delays
elsewhere, CRFB noted.
Some government services that get
income from fees can also continue during a shutdown. The State
Department said in its contingency plan that
“[c]onsular operations domestically and abroad will remain 100% operational as
long as there are sufficient fees to support operations. This includes
passports, visas, and assisting U.S. citizens abroad.”
The U.S. Postal Service, because
it is self-funded, will remain open.
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The post Q&A on Looming Government Shutdown appeared
first on FactCheck.org.
ATTACHMENT
FOUR – From ABC
WHICH
FEDERAL PROGRAMS WOULD BE IMPACTED FIRST IN A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN
Much of the government is getting
close to shutting down Oct. 1 as Congress struggles
to pass a stopgap funding deal -- and on Monday, with just five days to go,
many federal workers and agencies were bracing for impact.
The House and Senate have until
the end of the day on Saturday, Sept. 30 to pass a spending deal. Little
progress was made over the weekend, and with Congress not returning until
Tuesday evening after being off for the Yom Kippur holiday, there's so little
time left a shutdown is being seen as almost inevitable.
In anticipation of that, the Office
of Management and Budget has advised federal agencies to review and update
their shutdown plans. OMB will tell agencies to enact those shutdown plans,
including notifying employees whether they have been furloughed or should
continue to report to work on Oct. 1.
MORE: What happens if the government
shuts down? A lot, history tells us
As many as 4 million workers could
lose pay as a result of a shutdown -- about half of whom are military troops
and personnel. While essential workers will remain on the job without pay,
others will be furloughed.
All government employees would get
back pay once the shutdown ends; federal contractors who are impacted by the
shutdown would not.
If a shutdown occurs, the first
possible missed or incomplete paycheck would be on Oct. 13 for many workers.
Several agencies have already
updated their plans for how to proceed if the government shuts down. If Congress
does not avert a shutdown by Sept. 30, Americans will likely feel it --
anywhere from travel, to drinking water to workplace inspections.
Travel
Air travelers could see
"significant delays and longer wait times for travelers at airports across
the country like there were during previous shutdowns," the White House
said.
The shortage of air traffic
controllers could get worse under a shutdown, said Transportation Secretary
Pete Buttigieg. He said last week that a government
shutdown would "stop us in our tracks" as the Federal
Aviation Administration works to train new controllers.
During a shutdown, TSA will remain
operable, with most of its workforce -- nearly 56,000 employees -- required to
work without pay.
Certain passport offices --
particularly those located inside federal buildings -- could close during a
government shutdown, potentially worsening a major backlog.
Also, it may not be the ideal time
to visit a national park. Many of them face closures -- that is, unless
governors use state money to keep them open. Some national parks may remain
open, but visitor facilities such as restrooms, visitor centers, information
kiosks, and ranger talks will be closed, according to the National Park
Service.
The travel sector could lose
roughly $140 million each day in a shutdown, according to the U.S. Travel Association.
Public health
and safety
Safe drinking water could be at
risk during a government shutdown because routine inspections will be halted,
according to the White House. The Environmental Protection Agency would stop
most inspections at hazardous waste sites as well as drinking water and
chemical facilities. Also, the EPA would pause plans and permit reviews that
ensure safe water and clean air standards are met.
The Food and Drug Administration
"could be forced to delay food safety inspections for a wide variety of
products all across the country," the White House said. E Coli hooray!
Workplace inspections would face
cutbacks because of limitations with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
and Department of Labor, according to the White House.
An upcoming shutdown could delay
new clinical trials for cancer and other research, the White House added.
Services for
women and children
Up to 10,000 children could lose
access to Head Start, the federal program for preschool children from
low-income families, in a shutdown.
Also, a $150 million contingency
fund for a program that helps feed 7 million women, infants and children (WIC)
would likely dry up within a few days. The program, which costs about $500
million per month, would then be left up to the states to keep it running.
Speaking at the White House press
briefing Monday, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack warned of the "real
consequences to real people when there is a shutdown."
"...The vast majority of WIC
participants would see an immediate reduction and elimination of those
benefits, which means the nutrition assistance provided would not be
available," Vilsack said.
What won't be
affected?
The vast majority of the
government will actually carry on as usual during a government shutdown. That's
because only 27% of federal spending is considered "discretionary,"
and requires annual approval from Congress. The other three-fourths of the
government is considered "mandatory" and will continue as usual.
That includes Medicare, Medicaid
and Social Security payments, which won't be affected. Neither will the U.S.
Postal Service, which uses its own revenue stream.
MORE: McCarthy expresses optimism on
averting government shutdown
The military, law enforcement and
other "excepted" workers would have to work in a government shutdown.
The president and members of
Congress will work and get paid during a shutdown. However, lawmakers' staffers
will not get paid.
Approved funding as well as funds
from court fees could keep the judiciary running -- at least for a limited
time.
ATTACHMENT
FIVE – From the Des Moines Register
Live updates: Status of an impending government shutdown and how it
could affect your family
NOTE: updates USA Today Attachment
One
WASHINGTON−The country is
four days away from a federal government shutdown that could impact millions of Americans, as infighting among House Republicans
has so far prevented Congress from passing spending bills.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is looking for progress this
week as the lower chamber tries to move a series of appropriations bills that
ultimately determine the budget for the federal government. A deal must be
reached this week to avoid an Oct. 1 shutdown.
Meanwhile, the Senate is trying to
move a continuing resolution, a stopgap spending bill that would temporarily fund federal agencies for another 45
days and avoid a shutdown.
But it would come with a potential
risk to McCarthy, who has hardline conservatives in the House calling for his removal if he works with Democrats or
passes a continuing resolution.
Here's what it means for you.
How does the
government shutdown affect me?
You don’t have to live in
Washington for a government shutdown to affect you.
If lawmakers can’t reach a
compromise to keep the government’s doors open, shutdowns have wide-ranging
impacts for Americans. The Food and Drug Administration may have to delay some
nonessential food safety inspections, and the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration could also limit their work.
Food assistance programs could
also see delays, and people who need to travel across the country and around
the world could see disruptions to air travel.
And a government shutdown may
impact students ranging from preschoolers to college grads. Ten thousand kids
could lose access to Head Start care
programs, and some student loan borrowers could see
disruptions.
– Marina Pitofsky
When would a
government shutdown start?
A government shutdown would start
Sunday if lawmakers cannot pass a federal budget or stopgap measure by Sept.
30.
The stopgap, known as a continuing
resolution, can kick – DJI would prevent an Oct.
1 shutdown by temporarily extending government funding.
−Savannah Kuchar
Why would
there be a government shutdown?
Hold off on placing any bets. If
lawmakers in the House and Senate can reach a compromise by Sept. 30 on a
dozen bills that would fund the government, a shutdown is off the table.
Congress could also pass a temporary measure to keep the government funded,
known as a continuing resolution.
But both of those options are
unlikely as of Tuesday morning. Lawmakers haven’t agreed on one of the 12 bills
they would need to pass, and a group of conservative House Republicans have
insisted on hardline spending cuts that have no chance of passing in the
Senate, which is currently controlled by Democrats.
Last week, House Democrats and
moderate Republicans appeared to start working on a
fallback plan, but it’s not clear the rare bipartisan push
would receive enough support to dodge a shutdown.
– Marina Pitofsky
Senate's
continuing resolution would fund government through Nov. 17
The Senate’s continuing resolution
released Tuesday evening funds the government through Nov. 17.
Some of the funding listed in the
package includes:
·
$4.5 billion
allocated to Ukraine
·
$6 billion in emergency funding to the Federal
Emergency Management Agency for the Disaster Relief Fund
·
$2.9 billion for Federal Aviation Administration
operations
Senators are voting Tuesday
evening on the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization bill, which will
be used as the vehicle to pass the stopgap measure if it passes in the upper
chamber.
− Rachel Looker
House GOP
says Senate CR is dead on arrival
Shortly after the Senate released
its bipartisan version of a short-term stopgap measure to avert a government
shutdown, House conservatives said the bill is dead on arrival in the lower
chamber. Any spending package, they say, has to include border security
provisions.“If you want to continue federal spending, then you have to secure
the border,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., an ultra-conservative lawmaker and key
negotiator in the House. “That is a position in the House that in my view, the
members are not gonna yield.”Rep. Garrett Graves, R-La., a close McCarthy ally,
echoed similar sentiments and told reporters House GOP lawmakers are “focused
on leveraging this moment right now to force the White House into closing the
border.”– Ken Tran
Vigilantes?
Do national
parks close in a government shutdown?
It depends on the park. During
previous shutdowns, some national parks closed entirely, while others remained
technically open but without staff to maintain them
Some fell into disarray, with
trash piling up and toilets overflowing.
But some park service employees,
such as emergency medical personnel, would still be on the job during a
government shutdown. However, services could be disrupted.
– Zach Wichter and Nathan Diller
Schumer: ‘The
Senate will move forward first’
Senate Majority Leader Chuck
Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday afternoon Senate Democrats and Republicans have
worked together to move forward with a continuing resolution, a stopgap measure
that will keep the government funded beyond Sept. 30.
“This C.R. is a bridge, not a
final destination. It will help us achieve our immediate and necessary goal of
avoiding a government shutdown and move us away from the senseless and aimless
extremism that has dominated the House so we can get to work on
appropriations,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell, R-Ky., urged his colleagues to support the stopgap measure.
“Congress needs to extend
government funding by the end of this week,” McConnell said.
Schumer said the upper chamber
will hold its first procedural vote to move forward with a stopgap measure this
evening.
- Rachel Looker
What is a
continuing resolution?
A continuing resolution is a
stopgap measure that extends last year's spending levels for a designated
period of time.
Questions remain as to what a
stopgap could look like, or for how long it would extend spending
levels.
Previous stopgap measures have
extended funding to the end of the calendar year, but McCarthy has hinted at a
shorter, one-month extension.
−Rachel Looker
Does Congress
get paid during a shutdown?
Members of Congress will still get
paid during a government shutdown. Some lawmakers however, have introduced
bills in the past to withhold pay for lawmakers during a shutdown. Rep. Angie
Craig, D-Minn., introduced legislation doing just
that last Wednesday.
“I’m introducing legislation to
block Member pay during a McCarthy shutdown, because it’s ridiculous that we
still get paid while folks like TSA workers are asked to work without a
paycheck,” Craig said in a statement.
Their staffers however, will not
receive pay. Like other federal employees, Congressional staffers and aides
considered essential work without pay and receive their paychecks retroactively
after the shutdown ends.
− Ken Tran
What's a
government shutdown?
A government shutdown means all
federal agencies and services officials don’t deem “essential” have to stop
their work and close their doors.
Some of those essential services
include the U.S. Postal Service delivering mail and people receiving Medicare
and Social Security benefits. Those will continue whether or not the government
shuts down.
But so-called “non-essential” work
can still have significant impacts for federal employees and Americans across
the country. Thousands of federal workers would be furloughed, government food
assistance benefits could be delayed and some food safety inspections could
also be put on pause.
– Marina Pitofsky
What happens
when the government shuts down?
In a government shutdown, all
federal agencies that are not "essential" — think U.S. Postal
Service, Medicare and Social Security — would stop work.
This means thousands of federal
employees would be on furlough and Americans would go without government
benefits such as food and housing support.
Air travel will be generally
spared: Air traffic controllers and TSA agents will continue working, though
without pay. Travelers may also contend with longer wait times and flight
delays.
− Savannah Kuchar
Military pay
could dry up during shutdown: Pentagon
Military pay for millions of
active-duty service members and reservists could dry up with a government
shutdown – a major difference between the current threatened shutdown and
previous recent suspensions of non-essential spending.
“Military personnel will not be
paid until such time as Congress appropriates funds available to compensate
them for this period of service,” the Defense Department said in a September
memo to Pentagon leaders preparing for a potential lapse in spending.
But the department said personnel
would continue working regardless. Federal workers are traditionally reimbursed
for lapses in funding once Congress agrees to resume spending, but the lapse in
paychecks can be difficult for staffers without savings.
“Military personnel on active
duty, including reserve component personnel on Federal active duty, will
continue to report for duty and carry out assigned duties,” the department said
in a Sept. 12 announcement in preparation for a shutdown.
The government has about 1.3
million active-duty service members and 800,000 reservists.
−Bart Jansen
Why would this
looming government shutdown be different for the military?
During three temporary shutdowns –
in late 1995 into early 1996, 2013 and late 2018 and early 2019 – military
salaries were paid during the broader lapses because military spending
legislation was approved separate from overall government spending, according
to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
For example, just before the 2013
shutdown began Congress approved legislation Sept. 30 to protect military pay
and President Barack Obama signed it. The Pay Our Military Act covered pay and
allowances for active-duty military and reservists, according to the report.
On Sept. 28, 2018, President
Donald Trump signed a spending bill that included the Defense Department, which
covered the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, according to the report.
But funding for the Coast Guard
dried up Dec. 21, 2018, for the 35-day shutdown because the agency is funded
under the Department of Homeland Security, the report said.
The Republican-led House
considered voting on a defense spending bill earlier this month, but couldn’t
agree on the rules for how to debate the measure amid opposition from renegade
GOP members and Democrats.
−Bart Jansen
How does a
government shutdown affect the stock market?
A government shutdown isn't likely
to help the stock market, investment experts say, but it probably won't hurt
much.
Stocks are already down on the
month, partly in anticipation of a potential shutdown. The benchmark S&P
500 has fallen more than 5% in September, from 4,508 to 4,274.
"You're seeing it right
now," said Jeffrey A. Hirsch, CEO of Hirsch Holdings and editor-in-chief
of the Stock Trader's Almanac. "There are a lot of things going on right
now, and the government shutdown is one of those straws."
September is also a historically
weak month for stocks, and the threat of a shutdown is but one of several
factors dragging markets this month, Hirsch said.
But history suggests the market
will ultimately recover.
"Historically, the market has
pretty much ignored government shutdowns," said Sam Stovall, chief
investment strategist at CFRA Research.
"There have been 20 since
1976, and whether you look at the week before the shutdown, the day before the
shutdown, or the entire duration of the average nine-day shutdown, the market
has gone nowhere, essentially."
In other words, Stovall said, the
looming shutdown is "more of a headline event than a bottom-line
event." Past shutdowns, Stovall said, left "angered tourists more
than disappointed traders."
−Daniel de Vise
Will the
government shutdown affect VA disability payments?
U.S. Secretary of Veterans
Affairs Denis McDonough said during a press
conference last week that veterans' benefits will be available
during the shutdown, including compensation, pension, education and housing
benefits. This includes disability payments.
After previous shutdowns, the
Veterans Affairs lobbied Congress to fund the department “on a two-year budget cycle
that exempts the department,” according to Veteran.com.
In the appropriations bill passed last year,
it notes that funding for the Veterans Benefits Administration and the Veterans
Health Administration “shall become available on October 1, 2023, to remain
available until expended.”
−Sudiksha Kochi
How long would
the government shutdown last?
Government funding is set to
expire on Oct. 1. How long a potential shutdown will last depends on how soon
the House and Senate are able to pass a new appropriations plan that President
Joe Biden signs.
The length of past government shutdowns have varied, lasting
from five days to 21 days.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-FL., said on
Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that if the departments of Labor and
Education "have to shut down for a few days as we get their appropriations
in line, that’s certainly not something that is optimal.”
“But I think it’s better than
continuing on the current path we are to America’s financial ruin,” Gaetz said.
−Sudiksha Kochi
What was the
longest government shutdown in U.S. history?
The longest government shutdown lasted for 35 days from
late 2018 to early 2019 under the Trump administration. It went into effect after
the House and Senate failed to reach a compromise on a short-term funding plan
to keep the government running through early next year.
The critical issue was that Senate
Democrats opposed President Donald Trump’s $5.7 billion request for building a
wall on the southern border.
Before that, the longest
government shutdown lasted from Dec. 5, 1995, to Jan. 6, 1996,
when Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Democratic President Bill
Clinton faced off over taxes.
- Sudiksha Kochi and John Fritze
Is Social
Security impacted by a government shutdown?
Social Security recipients will continue to receive checks in
the event of a government shutdown and Medicare benefits will not be
interrupted.
However, employees in the Social
Security Administration are likely to be furloughed and government food
assistance benefits could see delay.
A few services that are not directly related to Social
Security payment benefits and direct-service operations would be temporarily
suspended.
− Marina Pitofsky and
Sudiksha Kochi
Moody's says
a government shutdown could hurt U.S. credit rating
The country’s credit rating could face
additional pressure if the government shuts down next week, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service.
While a short-lived shutdown would
not impact government debt service payments and isn’t expected to disrupt the economy,
Moody's said it would “underscore the weakness” of U.S. institutional and
governance strength compared to countries with similar credit ratings.
“In particular, it would
demonstrate the significant constraints that intensifying political polarization
put on fiscal policymaking at a time of declining fiscal strength,” Moody's report reads.
If the potential shutdown does drag
on, it would "likely be disruptive both to the US economy and financial
markets," although Moody's notes that any government shutdown is more
likely to be brief and concentrated in areas with a large government presence,
like Washington, D.C.
− Bailey Schulz
Would a
government shutdown impact travel?
The deepest impact would not be on your flight or cruise.
Funding to agencies like the
Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Security Administration and
Customs and Border Protection would be on hold. However, the agents who you typically
interact with at airports and seaports, and the controllers who oversee your
flights are considered essential and will be working without pay during the
shutdown.
Impacts on those agencies have
more to do with things like hiring and training. All the crucial safety
functions like inspections and air traffic control continue.
Consular operations in the U.S.
and internationally will also continue normally “as long as there are
sufficient fees” collected to support them, according to the most recent guidance from the State Department. “This
includes passports, visas, and assisting U.S. citizens abroad.”
There could be economic
repercussions, though. A government shutdown is estimated to cost the country's
travel economy as much as $140 million per day, according to an analysis for the U.S. Travel Association.
− Zach Wichter and Nathan
Diller
What does a
government shutdown mean for Medicare?
Medicare benefits will continue,
though there could be a delay in some payments.
The benefits are considered among
essential services, along with U.S. mail delivery, air travel, Amtrak, Social
Security payments and more.
-Candy Woodall
What agencies
are affected by a government shutdown?
All agencies could be affected by
a government shutdown.
From the Department of Homeland
Security to the Department of Agriculture, each agency will have a plan to stop
its nonessential functions, and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will
be furloughed.
Agencies also rely on each other
during a shutdown. For example, the State Department’s U.S. Passport Agency will remain open during
a government shutdown, so you should be able to get a passport if you need one.
But if passport services are offered in a building near you that’s run by an
agency that has shut down, you could have to look elsewhere.
– Marina Pitofsky
Does a
government shutdown affect federal retirees?
A government shutdown would have
major consequences for hundreds of thousands of federal employees, but federal
retirees will receive payments if lawmakers fail to keep the government
open.
These retirement payments are one
of several functions that won’t stop during a government shutdown, alongside
Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Employees ranging from air traffic
controllers to emergency personnel in national parks will also stay on the job,
whether or not the government shuts down.
– Marina Pitofsky
What will not
be impacted by a government shutdown?
President Joe Biden and members of
Congress will continue to work and get paid, but their staff members who aren’t
considered “essential” will be furloughed. The Supreme Court will also stay
open, but federal courts could have to scale back functionality.
But what does essential mean?
Think employees such as air traffic controllers and law enforcement officers.
U.S. embassies and consulates would likely stay open, and you should still be
able to get a passport and visa.
If you’re planning a trip to
Washington D.C. or a National Park, monuments and other areas will likely stay
open. However, maintenance of those areas may be delayed or canceled
altogether.
And as the holidays approach, a
government shutdown also likely won't impact NORAD's beloved Santa Tracker.
– Marina Pitofsky
Will a
government shutdown affect state employees?
A shutdown could impact state employees whose
employers depend on federal funds to operate and must shut down certain
activities that the government has deemed non-necessary.
In this case, certain state employees
could be furloughed until a shutdown passes.
But state employees who receive
salaries from private employers who do not rely on federal funds wouldn’t
necessarily be impacted.
-Sudiksha Kochi
ATTACHMENT
SIX – From
MORE: What happens if the government
shuts down? A lot, history tells us
ATTACHMENT
SEVEN – From CNN
TENSIONS ERUPT BETWEEN MCCARTHY AND GAETZ AT CLOSED-DOOR HOUSE GOP
MEETING AS SHUTDOWN NEARS
By Melanie Zanona, Clare
Foran, Lauren Fox and Haley Talbot, CNN Updated 4:02 PM EDT, Thu September 28, 2023
Tensions erupted as House
Republicans met behind closed-doors on Thursday, the latest sign of deep
divisions and infighting as the House GOP conference has failed to coalesce
around a plan to avert a shutdown.
GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz and Speaker
Kevin McCarthy got into a testy exchange during the meeting, according to a
source in the room. Gaetz stood up and confronted McCarthy about whether his
allies were paying conservative influencers to bash Gaetz in social media posts
– an allegation circulating on social media and one the speaker’s office has
denied.
McCarthy’s response, according to
the source in the room, was that he wouldn’t waste his time or money on Gaetz.
Another source said McCarthy also shot back that he doesn’t know what Gaetz is
spending time on, but he (the speaker) is donating $5 million to help keep the
majority.
“I asked him whether or not he was
paying those influencers to post negative things about me online,” Gaetz told
CNN’s Manu Raju – and confirmed that McCarthy said he wouldn’t waste time on
him.
McCarthy and Gaetz have long had a
tense relationship and Gaetz has led the charge in threatening to force a vote
to oust the speaker as pressure on McCarthy builds during the shutdown spending
fight and hardline conservatives balk at the prospect of passing any kind of
short-term funding extension to keep the government opening.
After the exchange, members in the
room could be heard complaining about Gaetz, with one member calling him a
“scumbag” and another saying “F**k off,” according to a third source in the
room.
McCarthy’s outside counsel earlier
this week sent a cease and desist letter to the person soliciting influencers
to bash Gaetz and claiming to be doing so on behalf of McCarthy, according to a
copy of the letter obtained by CNN.
With only three days to go before
government funding expires, House Republican divisions have been on full
display with the conference at odds over the path forward as Congress barrels toward a shutdown.
The Senate has put together a bipartisan proposal to avert a shutdown and is working to advance it through the chamber to final passage. But House Republicans have thrown cold water on that plan, leaving the two chambers at an impasse.
Instead, McCarthy is gearing up to
have the chamber vote Friday on a GOP stopgap bill, but he appears to lack the
votes from his own members to pass the measure.
House
Republicans gear up for spending fight
House Republicans are planning late
night votes Thursday on a series of separate spending bills, though it’s not
clear if the measures have enough GOP support to pass and at least one is
expected to fail. Even if any of the bills pass, they would be dead on arrival
in the Senate.
Any failed bills could provoke
another chaotic scene on the House floor that would put the divisions within
the House GOP conference front and center, and hand another embarrassing defeat
to GOP leaders.
A number of House conservatives
oppose any kind of stopgap measure because they argue that Congress needs to
focus instead on enacting full-year appropriations bills.
House GOP leaders put full-year
funding bills on the floor hoping that if they can demonstrate progress on the
measures, it could help them make the case to conservative holdouts that they
are working to complete the regular appropriations process, but more time is
needed to finish the work.
On the other hand, if any of the
spending bills fail, GOP leadership may point to that to make the case to the
holdouts that a short-term funding extension is the only viable path forward.
House GOP leadership has now
decided to keep an Agriculture appropriations bill on the schedule for Thursday
evening, despite roughly 50 members indicating they will vote against the bill,
according to a Republican aide.
The bill is expected to fail
dramatically on the floor at this point, though – as always – the schedule is
flexible and could change.
And despite the fact that House
GOP leadership does not currently have the votes for their short-term spending
bill, the plan remains that the House will vote tomorrow on a measure, three
sources told CNN.
McCarthy has been saying all week
this was the plan but as the hardliners have dug in, it remained an open
question if he’d go through with it, risk a potentially embarrassing vote and
be seen as unable to pass a bill out of his chamber before a Saturday midnight
deadline.
Senate works
to advance bipartisan bill
Meanwhile, the Senate is working
to advance a bipartisan stopgap bill that would keep the government open
through November 17 and provide additional aid to Ukraine and disaster relief.
McCarthy has so far dismissed that bill.
It could take until Monday to pass
the Senate’s bill to keep the government open if GOP Sen. Rand Paul slows down
the process over his demand that the bill drop the $6.2 billion in aid to
Ukraine it contains, according to senators. That would put it past the Saturday
evening shutdown deadline.
GOP senators are trying to cut a
deal to give Paul an amendment vote in exchange to let the process speed up.
Any one senator can slow down the process, and it takes unanimous support to
expedite a vote in the chamber.
The Senate took a procedural vote
to advance the bipartisan stopgap bill on Thursday, though it’s still not clear
when a final passage vote will take place. The vote was 76 to 22.
A small group of Senate
negotiators are frantically working to find a series of amendments that could
boost border security and be added to the Senate’s short-term spending bill and
GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, a member of that group, said on Thursday that they are
making progress.
Tillis said negotiators are eyeing
separate amendments on more funding for border security and changes in border
policy. One would be an amendment that would increase funding and would require
just a simple majority of votes to pass. The other that deals with policy would
be at a higher 60 vote threshold.
“Time is of the essence,” Tillis
said when asked how long this would take.
Government prepares
to shut down
As the September 30 shutdown
deadline rapidly approaches, the federal government has begun preparing for its
effects.
A shutdown could have enormous impacts across
the country, in consequential areas ranging from air travel to clean drinking
water, as many government operations would come to a halt, while
services deemed “essential” would continue.
The nearly 4 million Americans who
are federal employees will feel the effect immediately. Essential workers will
remain on the job, but others will be furloughed until the shutdown is over.
None will be paid during the impasse. For many, a shutdown would strain their
finances, as it did during the record 35-day funding lapse in 2018-2019.
Democratic and Republicans alike
have been highlighting the potential impacts of a shutdown as they warn against
a lapse in funding.
“It’s important to remember that
if we shut down the government – for those of us who are concerned about the
border and want it to be improved – the border patrol … have to continue to
work for nothing,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said at a news
conference Wednesday.
US Border Patrol agents are considered essential and
will continue to perform their law enforcement functions, including
apprehending migrants crossing the border unlawfully, during a government
shutdown – but without pay.
The White House is sounding alarms
about massive disruptions to air travel as tens of thousands of air traffic controllers
and Transportation Security Administration personnel work without pay. During
the 2019 shutdown, hundreds of TSA officers called out from work – many of them
to find other ways to make money.
The White House has warned that a
shutdown could risk “significant delays for travelers” across the country.
The White House has also warned of
impacts to national security, including the 1.3 million active-duty troops who
would not get paid during a shutdown.
ATTACHMENT
EIGHT – From the Dept. of Defense
KEY OFFICIAL SAYS SHUTDOWN WOULD DAMAGE NATIONAL DEFENSE
Sept. 26,
2023 | By Jim Garamone , DOD News
The Chinese
army is not facing a shutdown nor is Russia shutting down its efforts to
conquer Ukraine, and the U.S. Congress must take steps to avoid a government
shutdown, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said.
Congress must
fund the government or pass a continuing resolution by the end of the fiscal
year on Saturday to avoid a government shutdown Oct. 1.
"We need
to avert any kind of effect that a shutdown could have, not just on the Defense
Department but throughout the federal government," Hicks said last
week.
DOD leaders
would like to see a full-funding bill passed, but Hicks said a continuing
resolution would be preferable if a government shutdown can be avoided. A
continuing resolution continues appropriations at the same level as the
previous fiscal year for a certain amount of time.
"As bad
as it could be to have a CR [continuing resolution] — which we always want
to avoid — it would be even worse for the defense of the nation to have a
shutdown," Hicks said.
The
government must close if there is a lapse in appropriations, but there are
exceptions to that rule. During a government shutdown, DOD still must continue
to defend and protect the United States and conduct on-going military
operations.
DOD would
continue activities funded by the Defense Working Capital Fund, a revolving
fund that funds business-like DOD activities. These activities are in the
Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Information Systems Agency and the
Defense Finance and Accounting Agency.
There are
also excepted activities mostly centered around duties necessary for the safety
of human life and the protection of government property.
"A shutdown
would degrade and impact our operational planning and coordination, impact our
more than 800,000 civilians, and severely diminish our ability to recruit and
retain quality individuals for military service," DOD officials
said.
On the
strategic level, a shutdown would play into the hands of U.S. competitors. A
shutdown requires money, and it also requires money when the government starts
up again — not to mention the lost time. "No amount of funding can make up
for lost time," the official said. "A shutdown impacts our ability to
outcompete the PRC [People's Republic of China] — it costs us time as well
as money, and money can't buy back time, especially for lost training
events."
On a
practical level, a shutdown would have significant repercussions for military
members and their families. Military personnel on active duty — including
reserve component service members on active duty — will continue to report
for duty and carry out assigned duties without pay. Most military permanent
change of station moves will be halted.
Post and base
services would be closed or limited. Elective surgeries and procedures in DOD
medical and dental facilities are not excepted activities and these would have
to be postponed.
The Defense
Commissary Agency would close commissaries in the United States but would keep
overseas facilities open.
DOD
civilians, including military technicians, who are not necessary to carry out
or support excepted activities would be furloughed. "Permanent change of
station for civilian personnel will continue only to the extent expenses are
chargeable to a funded PCS order issued prior to the funds lapse,"
officials said.
Once a
continuing resolution or appropriations act is signed, employees will be paid
retroactively for unpaid hours worked and time charged as furlough as soon as
feasible, officials said.
Active and
reserve component service members will receive September's end-of-month
paychecks on Sept. 29. Military members cannot be paid during the lapse unless
legislation is passed appropriating funds. "October['s] mid-month,
military pay will be delayed if a continuing resolution or appropriation is not
passed by Oct. 11," officials said. "Leave and earnings statements
will not be released."
Military
retirees and annuitants are not paid from appropriations, so their payments
will continue as scheduled, officials said.
ATTACHMENT
NINE – From Time
WHY SOME BORDER TOWNS ARE WORRIED ABOUT A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN
By Nik Popli And Sanya Mansoor September 25, 2023 6:12 PM
With the threat of a U.S.
government shutdown looming at the end of the month, local officials in border
towns are worried that staff shortages among federal workers would make it
harder to stop criminal activity and process an influx of migrants. Victor
Treviño, the mayor of Laredo, Tex., foresees a
“catastrophic situation” if House Republicans are unable to agree on a spending
plan.
“It's totally different than the
rest of the country. We're at the border,” Treviño says. “Three to four days
will throw everything off scale, it'll cause devastation.” If the shutdown occurs, he says
he’s prepared to declare a state of emergency.
Calls for increased border
security have intensified this week after a recent surge in migration near the
southern border overwhelmed already-crowded facilities and temporarily closed
an international bridge, placing border security in the spotlight as Republicans
in Congress hope to link controversial border measures with the government’s
spending plan.
As the Sept. 30 spending deadline
approaches, a government shutdown is increasingly likely. Congress is yet to
pass any of the 12 appropriations bills that need to be signed into law to keep
the government running as House Republicans remain divided over top-line
spending levels and various policy concessions.
Several House Republicans have
threatened to block a stopgap bill to keep the government funded unless it
includes a security crackdown along the U.S.-Mexico border. Such a proposal to
extract border-security concessions in exchange for funding the government is
considered dead-on-arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate. But some
conservatives are determined to tie border issues to the spending fight. “The
most critical for me is getting something out so that we can move H.R. 2 [the
House GOP’s border bill] and use it as a vehicle for pressuring Senate
Democrats to actually do something on the border in the absence of leadership
from the President,” Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and member of the
Freedom Caucus, told reporters on Sept. 21. “That’s where the priorities lie
for me.”
The pace of unlawful crossings at
the southern border dropped sharply in the spring amid uncertainty over the the
end of a pandemic-era immigration policy, but numbers rebounded over the summer
and are now more than double the 4,900 unlawful crossings a day in April. When
asked about how border security provisions would be reflected in Republicans’
plan to fund the government, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters at the
Capitol on Monday that “something’s got to change.”
“We just set a new record of
11,000 people [coming across the border] illegally,” he said. “To continue to
fund the government to secure the border, I think members should be able to be
for that.”
Yet if Republicans push border
security measures that Democrats refuse to fund, a government shutdown could
exacerbate the worsening border situation. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a South Texas
Democrat who sits on the Appropriations Committee, tells TIME that a shutdown
will have a significant impact on the nation’s border security, particularly by
forcing some border agents to work without pay and possibly furloughing others,
and marking the expiration of an existing counter-drone authority that allows
federal agencies to identify and neutralize intrusive drones deemed potentially
dangerous or threatening. “I find it very ironic that Republicans are
threatening a shutdown when this is going to weaken [border security] by taking
away authorities and funding, including contractors, from the border,” he says.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas
Democrat who represents the San Antonio area, tells TIME that thousands of
servicemembers in his district may have to work without pay if the government
shuts down, placing a financial burden on some military families. “My office
has already been getting calls from constituents who are worried about making
ends meet,” he says. “I hope cooler heads will prevail in the Republican Party
to keep the government open.”
Treviño is worried in particular
about a reduction of
staffing at the processing center for migrants in Laredo, which he
says processes approximately 1,000 people per day. “All these migrants could wind up in the streets,”
he says. “They have small children, there’s families, we can’t just turn a
blind eye to that.” Depending on how long the shutdown takes—and how long
officers can forgo their paychecks—the local processing capacity could come to
a halt, he says. “People need to feed their family; they need to pay their
bills.”
There’s also security concerns.
“There’s always the danger of illegal activity from cartels… smuggling drugs
and things like that,” he continues. “If there’s no security, then that
activity will increase tremendously.”
Doris Meissner, senior fellow at
the Migration Policy Institute, argues that “the shutdown should not be so
noticeable” in border towns. That’s because law enforcement employees are
typically exempt from government shutdowns; they will not be paid during a
shutdown, but typically would continue working and get their pay retroactively
once the shutdown ends. The longest government shutdown lasted for 34 days under the Trump Administration,
and there wasn’t a major exodus of law enforcement employees in border towns
during that time, according to Meissner. “The exemption for law enforcement
agencies is very broad now,” Meissner says. “I'm quite confident that CBP [U.S.
Customs and Border Protection] particularly—given the pressures that it's under
right now on the border—will establish those definitions as broadly as possible
exactly for the reasons that [Treviño] is talking about.” Still, a 2019 congressional report found that government
shutdowns weakened border security. While border patrol agents continued to
work, delayed maintenance and repair “endangered the lives of law enforcement
officers and created significant border security vulnerabilities,” the report
noted.
Blake Barrow, CEO of Rescue
Mission of El Paso, which operates two shelters—one specifically for migrants
and another for American citizens— also isn’t particularly fazed by a potential
shutdown’s impact on his work. “The government’s not doing much to help us
anyway,” he says.
Still, the uncertainty around
whether a shutdown will occur, how long it will last, and which employees it
will affect has worried some local officials in border towns as they deal with
spiking numbers of border crossings. “The shutdown would really, really
devastate everything,” Treviño says.
ATTACHMENT
TEN – Also From Time
Here's How a Government Shutdown Could Affect You
BY NIK POPLI SEPTEMBER 25, 2023 7:00 AM EDT
The U.S. government is set to shut
down next weekend unless Congress manages to strike a last-minute agreement to
pass a dozen spending bills before the Sept. 30 funding deadline, an unlikely
scenario that has left many Americans anxiously wondering how a potential
government shutdown would impact them.
During a shutdown, the government
can only spend money on essential services, such as those related to law
enforcement and public safety. That means hundreds of thousands of federal
workers won’t receive a timely paycheck, while others will be furloughed, which
could inflict severe financial hardships on some American families at a time
when many are still struggling with elevated prices due to inflation and
impending student loan repayments.
A government shutdown occurs when
Congress fails to approve new spending for federal agencies, which require
congressional authorization each year to expend funds. As of Monday, Congress
is yet to pass any of the 12 appropriations bills that need to be signed into
law to keep the government running as House Republicans remain divided over
top-line spending levels and various policy concessions.
Read
More: These Are the Key GOP Players in the Government Shutdown Fight
The last government shutdown
occurred in December 2018, when most government activity came to a halt for 34
days, the longest in the modern era.
It isn’t just federal workers who
will feel the effects of a shutdown. Here are some of the ways a federal
government shutdown will impact Americans.
Federal
employees and military personnel
If the government shuts down, tens
of thousands of federal employees would be furloughed and sent home without
pay. Those who are deemed essential workers, such as employees in public safety
and national security, would report to work without pay. Once federal funding
resumes, the government is required by law to repay federal employees and
military personnel. Federal contractors would not be compensated for missed
time.
Each federal agency decides which
services and employees are essential, which typically includes law enforcement
officers, national security agents, active duty military personnel, and federal
prison guards. Members of the military and federal law enforcement, for
example, would continue going to work, while civilian personnel working for the
Defense Department would be furloughed.
Federal employees should note that
those who work during a shutdown when they aren’t supposed to could face fines
or a prison term under the Antideficiency Act.
National
parks, public spaces, and airports
Recreational facilities funded by
the federal government would be forced to close, meaning travelers and tourists
may be unable to visit national park facilities or the Smithsonian museums in Washington during a
shutdown. The National Park Service estimated that a 2013 government shutdown
led to a $500 million loss in visitor spending nationwide.
Some airports may also experience
disruptions and delays, such as during the 2019 shutdown when air traffic
controllers working without pay threatened to walk off the job—a move that
helped end the shutdown. Passport offices in certain regions could also close,
causing inconvenience for those planning international travel.
Federal
safety-net programs
While food stamps and other
nutrition aid programs would continue during a shutdown, federal agencies may
have to reduce support after the Sept. 30 funding deadline if the shutdown
persists for an extended period. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for
Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, for example, which provides food
and vegetable benefits, is already facing a funding crisis, with the White House
requesting Congress approve $1.4 billion in emergency funding for the program
in late August.
The White House estimates that
roughly 10,000 children would lose access to childcare starting in October as disruptions to
programs like Head Start, which offers grants to childcare organizations, could
force some childcare centers to close.
Disaster
relief
With disaster relief efforts in
Maui and Florida underway after recent wildfires and hurricanes, the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) has warned that its Disaster Relief Fund is
dangerously low and could be depleted if the government shuts down without
approving emergency funding. “A government shutdown will slow down our recovery
efforts,” Rep. Jill Tokuda, who represents the Maui area in Congress, told TIME in August.
What remains
open during a shutdown?
Agencies that have already
received funding approval or operate on a permanent funding basis would
continue to operate as usual. For instance, the Postal Service and entitlement
programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, would continue to run during a
shutdown because they are funded by permanent appropriations that do not need
to be renewed every year.
Veterans Affairs benefits,
including pensions and disability checks, will also continue as normal under a
shutdown.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
will also continue normal operations during a government shutdown—meaning the
agency’s 83,000 workers would not be furloughed—due to funding approved through
Congress last year. Taxpayers remain obligated to fulfill their tax
obligations, and services like tax return processing carry on unaffected.
ATTACHMENT
ELEVEN – From the AP
CONGRESS IS MOVING INTO CRISIS MODE AS SENATE UNVEILS BIPARTISAN BILL
TO AVOID A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN
By LISA MASCARO and STEPHEN
GROVES, Associated Press •17h
WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress is
rushing headlong into crisis mode Tuesday with a government shutdown days away, as
Speaker Kevin
McCarthy faces an insurgency from hard-right Republicans eager to slash
spending even if it means halting pay for the military and curtailing federal
services for millions of Americans.
There's no clear path ahead as
lawmakers return with tensions high and options limited. The House is expected
to launch an evening vote on a package of bills to fund parts of the government,
but it's not at all clear that McCarthy has the support needed as holdouts demand
steeper spending cuts.
“It’s easy,” McCarthy quipped
Tuesday when asked about keeping the government open.
But with just five days to go
before Saturday's deadline, the Senate is trying to stave off a federal closure
as the hard-right flank seizes control of the House. Senators unveiled a bipartisan stopgap measure to keep offices
funded for temporarily, through Nov. 17, to buy time for Congress to finish its
work.
The 79-page Senate bill would fund
the government at current levels and include about $6 billion supplemental funding for Ukraine and $6 billion
in U.S. disaster assistance that has been in jeopardy. It also
includes an extension of Federal Aviation Administration provisions expiring
Saturday.
Ahead of a test vote Tuesday
evening, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the temporary measure from
the Senate “a bridge towards cooperation and away from extremism.”
With a supportive nod, Senate
Republican leader Mitch McConnell appeared on board with the bipartisan Senate
plan saying, “Government shutdowns are bad news.”
A government shutdown would
disrupt the U.S. economy and the lives of millions of Americans who work for
the government or rely on federal services — from the military personnel and
air traffic controllers who would be asked to work without pay to some 7
million people in the Women, Infants and Children program, including half the
babies born in the U.S., who could lose access to nutritional benefits,
according to the White House.
The standoff comes against the
backdrop of the 2024 elections as a core group of
hard-right Republicans are being egged on by Donald Trump, the Republican
frontrunner to challenge President Joe Biden, who has urged McCarthy's House to
stand firm in the fight or “shut it down.”
It is setting up a split-screen
later this week as House Republicans hold their first Biden impeachment inquiry hearing probing
the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden, as Congress spirals closer to a
shutdown. It also comes as former Trump officials are floating their own plans
to slash government and the federal workforce if
the former president retakes the White House.
Against the mounting chaos, Biden
warned the Republican conservatives off their hard-line tactics, saying funding
the federal government is “one of the most basic fundamental responsibilities
of Congress."
Biden implored the House
Republicans not to renege on the debt deal he struck earlier this year with
McCarthy, which set the federal government funding levels and was signed into
law after approval by both the House and the Senate.
“We made a deal, we shook hands,
and said this is what we’re going to do. Now, they’re reneging on the deal,”
Biden said late Monday.
But Trump is pushing Republicans
to dismantle the deal with Biden. “Unless you get everything, shut it down!”
Trump wrote in all capital letters on social media. “It’s time Republicans
learned how to fight!”
The Republican speaker McCarthy
brushed off Trump’s influence as just a negotiating tactic, even as the
far-right plan keeps torpedoing his plans.
McCarthy arrived at the Capitol
after a tumultuous week in which a handful of hard-right Republicans torpedoed
his latest plans to advance a usually popular defense funding bill. They
brought the chamber to a standstill, and leaders sent lawmakers home for the
weekend with no endgame in sight.
McCarthy, of California, was
hopeful the latest plan on a package of four bills, to fund Defense, Homeland
Security, Agriculture, and State and Foreign Operations, would kickstart the
process.
At the same time, McCarthy was
also reviving his plan for the Republicans to pass their own stopgap measure
even though a handful on the hard-right said they would never vote for it,
denying him a majority. That proposal would fund the government while also
adding severe border security provisions that
Biden, Democrats, and even some Republicans reject.
“I'm working all my time to make
sure that there would not be a shutdown,” McCarthy insisted Tuesday.
But at least one top Trump ally,
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who is also close to McCarthy, said she
would be a “hard no” on the vote Tuesday to open debate, known as the Rule,
because the package of bills continues to provide at least $300 million for
the war
in Ukraine.
Other hard-right conservatives and
allies of Trump may follow her lead.
While their numbers are just a handful,
the hard-right Republican faction holds sway because the House majority is
narrow and McCarthy needs almost every vote from his side for partisan bills
without Democratic support.
The speaker has given the holdouts
many of their demands, but it still has not been enough as they press for more
— including gutting funding for Ukraine, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Washington last
week is vital to winning the war against Russia.
The hard-line Republicans want
McCarthy to drop the deal he made with Biden and stick to earlier promises for
spending cuts he made to them in January to win their votes for the speaker's gavel, citing the
nation's rising debt load.
Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of
Florida, a key Trump ally leading the right flank, said on Fox News Channel
that a shutdown is not optimal but “it's better than continuing on the current
path that we are to America's financial ruin.”
Gaetz, who has also threatened to
call a vote to oust McCarthy from his job, wants Congress to do what it rarely
does anymore: debate and approve each of the 12 annual bills needed to fund the
various departments of government — typically a process that takes weeks, if
not months.
Even if the House is able to
complete its work this week on some of those bills, which is highly uncertain,
they would still need to be merged with similar legislation from the Senate,
another lengthy process.
___ Associated Press writers Seung
Min Kim, Kevin Freking and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.
ATTACHMENT
TWELVE – From Fox
HOUSE
GOP COULD WORK WITH DEMS TO FUND GOVERNMENT, AVERT SHUTDOWN
Lawmakers are back on Capitol Hill
Tuesday with just five days left to find common ground on funding the
government before midnight Saturday, or risk a partial shutdown.
The latter is becoming
increasingly likely with the Senate and House not only far apart on a spending
deal, but also still fighting to agree on a starting position at the
negotiating table.
"I think there's a decent
chance of a shutdown, but it isn't inevitable yet," Kurt Couchman, senior
fellow in fiscal policy at Americans for Prosperity, told Fox News Digital.
"We’re just running out of time."
House GOP leaders are hoping to
advance four of their 12 annual appropriations bills toward
House floor votes on Tuesday, after disagreements on how – and if – to avoid a
government shutdown blew up multiple procedural votes last week.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.,
can only afford to lose a handful of votes on any bill to still pass it without
left-wing support.
McCarthy took a shot at GOP rebels
he accused of slow-walking Republicans’ spending bills on Monday,
"Remember we've had these posted since July, but we had some members you
remember back even before then that would shut the floor down. We couldn't do
anything. Apparently they're willing to work now."
Meanwhile, moderate Republicans
who are growing nervous about the prospect of a shutdown are already sitting
down with Democrats for a bipartisan deal – much to the ire of their hardline
colleagues.
A new bill was introduced Monday
by Reps. Jared Golden, D-Maine, Don Bacon, R-Neb., Ed Case, D-Hawaii, and Brian
Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., called the Bipartisan Keep America Open Act, which would
fund the government at fiscal year 2023 levels until Jan. 11, 2024.
TRIPLE HOUSE MELTDOWN ON DEFENSE BILL MAY MARK THE WORST
RUN FOR A HOUSE MAJORITY IN MODERN HISTORY
It would also provide $24 billion
in funding for Ukraine with transparency
requirements, $16 billion in U.S. disaster relief aid, and would establish a
substitute for the Title 42 border expulsion policy as well as a commission to
study the federal debt, among other measures.
In the Senate, Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., signaled that another must-pass bill could serve as a
vehicle for a stopgap funding bill, known as a continuing resolution
(CR).
Congressional leaders on both
sides have agreed that a CR is likely necessary to give lawmakers more time to
cobble together the next fiscal year’s spending bills. The current deadline,
Sept. 30, is also Congress’ due date to reauthorize the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA).
Schumer said Thursday, "I
have just filed cloture to move forward on FAA. As I have said for months, we
must work in a bipartisan fashion to keep our government open… This action will
give the Senate the option to do just that."
THE SPEAKER'S LOBBY: THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO A POSSIBLE
GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN
Couchman, the budget expert, said
everything has to run "perfectly" this week in order to avoid a
shutdown.
"The Senate is moving forward
with legislation to do a CR, but if everything goes perfectly, that won't be
done in the Senate until midday on Friday," he said. "And then the
House would have to pass it sometime on Saturday, and President Biden would
have to sign it that evening to prevent a shutdown. That's assuming everything
goes perfectly, and that doesn't seem like it can be assured, so it's definitely
possible that we could have a shutdown, but I think it'll be short."
He reasoned that lawmakers would
act to not let the FAA expire. "If there's any kind of disruption at all
to air travel, a shutdown will end almost immediately," Couchman
predicted.
But lawmakers have a long way to
go before reaching a deal. A Democratic CR would likely be a "clean"
extension of the previous Congress where they controlled both chambers – a
bill that would be a nonstarter with conservatives in the House.
But several House GOP proposals
for a CR – floated with deep spending cuts for their 30-day durations as well
as commitments to slash spending for the full next year – have been scuttled by
some who are opposed to any kind of a CR on
principle.
McCarthy did not reference the
disorder when he told reporters Monday, "We've got the CR working now so
we could do it at any time." He did not give any specifics on
timing.
Couchman told Fox News Digital
that a shutdown would reflect negatively on both parties.
"We didn't even have federal
government shutdowns until 1980, so this is a 43-year experiment," he
said. "It creates bad incentives. We see this every year, it never seems
to be a functional process and that's part of the reason why Congress never
intended shutdowns to be possible."
Original article source: Congress returns to DC with five days to avert a
government shutdown
ATTACHMENT
THIRTEEN – From the Huffington Post
The
government is headed toward a “Seinfeld shutdown” thanks to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.),
conservative commentator Charlie Sykes said
Tuesday.
“What is this shutdown about? The executive vice president of the Chamber
of Commerce ― which is a Republican-leaning organization ― says
he’s thinking of this as the ‘Seinfeld shutdown,’ because it’s a shutdown about
nothing,” Sykes, founder of The Bulwark website, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid.
ATTACHMENT
FOURTEEN – From France 24
Millions of Americans braced
Monday for pay and welfare checks to stop within days as Congress careened
toward a damaging government shutdown, with Republican right wingers blocking
attempts to pass a budget.
Four months after barely avoiding
the more serious prospect of a credit default, the world's largest economy is
once again on the verge of a convulsion, with the lights due to go out at the
weekend.
Republicans leading the House of
Representatives – hamstrung by hardline rebels demanding deep spending cuts –
have been unable to pass the usual series of bills setting out departmental
budgets for the next financial year, which begins on Sunday.
The party's leadership does not
even have the votes to advance a short-term funding bill at 2023 spending
levels – known as a continuing resolution – to keep the government open past
midnight on Saturday.
A shutdown would put at risk the
finances of workers at national parks, museums and other sites operating on
federal funding, but it could also carry significant political risk for
President Joe Biden as he runs for re-election in 2024.
"Funding the government is
one of the of the most basic, fundamental responsibilities of the
Congress," the Democrat told reporters at the White House. "And if
Republicans in the House don't start doing their job we should stop electing
them."
The Biden adminstration also
warned that seven million people who rely on the food aid program for women and
children could also see their money stopped.
Republicans
refuse to back McCarthy
The funding deadlock arose after
House Republicans refused to support the government spending levels agreed
between Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in Congress, that
would keep government gears turning.
Another major sticking point has
been a request for additional aid for Kyiv, after Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky visited Congress last week pleading for more weapons to battle Russian
forces 18 months into the war.
Both parties in the Senate support
the $24 billion aid bill. But a handful of hardline Republicans in the House
are threatening to block any funding measures that include the aid.
"UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING,
SHUT IT DOWN!," former president Donald Trump demanded in a post on his
Truth Social platform late Sunday as he led calls for the Republican hardliners
to dig in.
Shutdown
threat a common pressure tactic
The budget vote in Congress
regularly turns into a standoff, with one party using the prospect of a
shutdown to seek concessions from the other, usually without success.
Trump, who is also running for
re-election, forced a 35-day shutdown over border controls in 2018 but ended up
reopening the government after failing to secure a single concession from
Democrats.
The impasse is invariably resolved
before the standoffs become crises but this year the showdown is exacerbated by
new levels of polarisation on Capitol Hill.
In the Senate, debate is led by
two political heavyweights, Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer and Mitch
McConnell, his Republican counterpart.
Congress was out Monday but
Schumer has been paving the way for a continuing resolution, including Ukraine
aid, in talks with McConnell and the White House.
A measure that would keep the
government open through early December has support on both sides of the Senate
– but would likely not be ready for a vote before the shutdown and would not
have the support of the Republican right.
Another
shutdown showdown just four months ago
The shutdown prospect comes just
four months after the United States came dangerously close to defaulting on its
debt, which could have had disastrous consequences for the American economy and
beyond.
Moody's – the only major ratings
agency to maintain its maximum score for US sovereign debt – warned that the
latest drama could threaten its top tier status.
The US government employs more
than two million civilian workers, as well as uniformed military personnel and
federal contractors. Civil servants deemed "non-essential" would be
asked to stay home during a shutdown, getting paid only on their return.
(AFP)
ATTACHMENT
FIFTEEN – From Al Jazeera
WILL US LAWMAKERS AVERT LOOMING GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN? ALL YOU NEED TO
KNOW
Published On 26 Sep 202326 Sep
2023
An annual political battle over
funding for the United States federal government has left the country on the
brink of a shutdown.
With just five days until the new
fiscal year begins on October 1, US legislators are scrambling to overcome an
impasse fuelled by hardline Republicans who have promised to block funding
legislation unless deep spending cuts are made.
On Tuesday, the administration of
US President Joe Biden, a Democrat, labelled the situation an “extreme
Republican shutdown”, saying it would also disrupt US national security.
“If Republicans in the House don’t
start doing their jobs, we should stop electing them,” the president said
earlier this week, accusing GOP lawmakers of failing to fulfil “one of the most
basic fundamental responsibilities of Congress”.
Here’s all you need to know.
How did we
get here?
Biden and Republican Kevin
McCarthy, the speaker of the House of Representatives, had agreed in May to authorise $1.59 trillion in
discretionary spending for the next fiscal year.
The agreement, relating to the
amount of money Congress can allocate to various parts of the government, was
meant to avert the current standoff.
However, a right-wing flank of the
Republican Party has since rejected the deal, calling for a wider debate on
government spending and for about $120bn to be cut from the $1.59 trillion that
was previously agreed.
Several more moderate Republicans
support the full amount of funding McCarthy and Biden agreed to. However, the
hardliners have outsized influence in the House because the GOP only holds a
221-212 majority over Democrats.
Why do the
hardliners oppose the funding legislation?
At particular issue has been including more aid to Ukraine in the funding package,
with a growing number of Republicans staunchly opposed to providing more assistance
to the country in its conflict with Russia.
McCarthy has publicly questioned
the breadth of Washington’s continued military and humanitarian support for
Kyiv in an attempt to appease the hardliners, but his efforts have come up
short.
Last week, they blocked a usually
popular defence bill despite the fact that it included an 8 percent cut to many
services and measures to strengthen the US-Mexico border.
Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a key ally of former President
Donald Trump who is leading the right flank, told Fox News that while a
government shutdown is not optimal, “it’s better than continuing on the current
path that we are to America’s financial ruin.”
Gaetz also has been a vocal critic
of McCarthy, threatening to remove the House speaker from his post if he tries
to work with Democrats to pass a “short-term stopgap measure” to avert the
shutdown, NBC News reported on Tuesday.
What would a
shutdown mean?
A government shutdown means that hundreds
of thousands of federal workers would be furloughed and a wide range of government services would
be suspended. Government workers deemed essential would remain on the job, but
would work without a paycheque.
A shutdown affects nearly every
corner of the US government, from the delivery of welfare cheques and
publishing of national economic data, to the operation of federal courts.
The Biden administration has
warned that seven million people who rely on a federal food aid programme for
women and children could see that assistance stop.
Other government services would
move to contingency plans. For instance, federal airport security screeners and
air-traffic control workers would be required to work, but without pay.
The White House has also said that
1.3 million active duty military personnel would be at risk of not being paid,
while hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Department of Defense would be
furloughed.
“All of this would prove
disruptive to our national security,” the White House said on Monday.
Meanwhile, Moody’s has warned that a shutdown would have negative
implications for the US government’s AAA credit rating, as it would highlight
how political polarisation is worsening the country’s fiscal standing.
What is being
done to avoid the shutdown?
Legislators in both parties are
meeting on Tuesday to find a solution, but no clear path has emerged.
The House is expected to vote on
Tuesday evening on a package of bills to fund parts of the government,
including the Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture, and State departments.
But it remained unclear if
McCarthy would have the needed support from his Republican Party.
“Let’s get this going,” McCarthy
said after a meeting of the House Rules Committee on Saturday in preparation
for this week’s voting. “Let’s make sure the government stays open while we
finish our job passing all the individual bills.”
At least one top Trump ally,
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is also close to McCarthy, said she
would be a “hard no” on the vote to open debate, known as the Rule, because the
package of bills continues to provide at least $300m for the war in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy ends US visit with
pledge of $128m in aid from White House
Even if passed, the bills would not
prevent a partial shutdown.
In the Senate, where Democrats
have a majority, legislators were preparing a bipartisan plan for a stopgap
measure to keep offices funded past the upcoming deadline.
However, plans to tack on
additional Ukraine aid could see some Republicans seek to slow-roll the passage
with few days left.
Will a
shutdown have any political effects?
Regardless of who forces a
shutdown, they have historically proven widely unpopular for US presidents, and
could be damaging to Biden’s 2024 re-election bid.
Trump, who is the current
frontrunner in the Republican Party’s 2024 nomination race, has urged his
allies in the House to hold a hard line.
“Unless you get everything, shut
it down!” he wrote in all capital letters on his Truth Social platform on
Sunday.
ATTACHMENT
SIXTEEN – From the WashPost
WHAT’S DRIVING A POSSIBLE SHUTDOWN? A FRACTION OF THE FEDERAL BUDGET.
Lawmakers in
both parties have called for getting serious about the rising federal debt. The
shutdown fight ignores its key drivers.
By Jeff Stein
and Marianna Sotomayor September
24, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Time is running out for Congress
to prevent a government shutdown, as
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tries to defuse the demands of
ultraconservatives in the House who are demanding aggressive spending cuts.
When lawmakers return Tuesday,
both the House and the Senate will try different tactics to fund the government
past the fast-approaching deadline — each looking to jam their preferred
legislation through the other chamber in a risky game of brinkmanship. Current
spending laws expire on Sept. 30, so the government will shut down at 12:01
a.m. on Oct. 1 without action.
What is affected by a government shutdown and how it could impact you
In the House, the GOP
majority failed several times last
week to reach consensus on a short-term funding bill, known as a continuing
resolution. Most of the conference says they want to avert a shutdown, but a
small group of far-right members who
oppose a short-term extension have blocked that option. So Republicans
will try to pass some
separate bills that would fund the government for the full fiscal year. The
Senate will begin work on its own short-term spending bill on Tuesday, aiming
to send it to the House by the weekend with hours to go before a shutdown
starts — where it would probably have enough votes to pass, but only with
support from Democrats, a red line for many in the GOP.
But while the far-right rebels in
McCarthy’s caucus say the rising national debt is such a threat that it’s worth
forcing the government to close down in pursuit of spending cuts, the
uncomfortable fiscal reality is that most of what is driving federal borrowing
to record levels isn’t even up for discussion this week.
Lawmakers point fingers amid
looming government shutdown
On Sept. 24, lawmakers and White
House cabinet members had mixed opinions on who would take blame for the
looming government shutdown.
Conservatives want to pare federal
discretionary spending back to 2022 levels, which would mean cutting more than
$100 billion from agency budgets each year.
That’s a lot of money, but hitting
the goal would require severe cuts to a small portion of the federal budget —
mostly programs that provide services like education, medical research and aid
for families in poverty. The government’s biggest annual expense, though, and
the main projected drivers of U.S. debt, are the retirement programs Medicare
and Social Security. The United States spends more than $6 trillion every year.
McCarthy’s caucus is tying itself in knots over how to make cuts from domestic
discretionary spending, which accounts for less than one-sixth of that total.
What’s driving a possible shutdown? House
Republicans for the second week in a row failed to move forward on any
legislation related to funding the government.
Here’s what we know about the possibility of a government
shutdown and how a shutdown could impact you.
Looking at it another way, the
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the annual federal
deficit is expected to rise to nearly $3 trillion per year by next decade, up
from roughly $2 trillion this year. If the conservatives in the House GOP get
everything they’re seeking now, that number could drop to about $2.8 trillion
per year.
“The people back in my district,
they’re tired of the way this town works,” said Rep. Elijah Crane (R-Ariz.),
who joined other conservatives in the last week to stymie McCarthy’s attempts
to move spending bills. “They understand there’s no appetite to spend money we
don’t have, and they expect me to do whatever I can to stop it, and to change
how we do business. It’s not always the most comfortable thing.”
But the disconnect between the
political rhetoric about the shutdown and the reality of the budget math
underscores how little lawmakers are doing to try to rein in the long-term
federal spending imbalance. Without a deal, the federal government will shut
down, hurting economic growth and leading to the suspension of a wide range of
essential public services.
“It’s a completely symbolic fight
that ignores 90 percent of the actual budget,” said Brian Riedl, who served as
an aide to former senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and is now a policy analyst at
the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “I think lawmakers
would have a lot more credibility if they were taking on the rest of the budget
at the same time.”
A federal government shutdown looks more and more likely: What to know
The fight is over such a small
portion of the budget because even Republicans have agreed not to touch the
biggest sources of federal spending, including the Social Security and Medicare
retirement programs, but also the military, border enforcement and veterans
benefits, which Democrats don’t want to cut, either. Republicans have also
ruled out higher taxes as part of any deal to lower the deficit. Instead, the
GOP has demanded cuts to domestic programs funded annually by Congress, known
as “discretionary” spending.
As part of a deal to avert a
breach of the debt ceiling in
June, President Biden and
McCarthy agreed to keep this
part of the budget essentially flat, which would amount to a cut, accounting
for inflation. Many House Republicans, however, now say that deal was a ceiling
on spending levels rather than a floor, and they want to cut roughly more than
$100 billion next year compared to this year. (The White House is also seeking
new emergency spending for natural disasters and the war in Ukraine, while
Senate appropriators are also seeking new funding that would circumvent
previously imposed congressional spending caps, according to the Committee for
a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank.)
Further complicating the math is
that Republicans are pushing for these cuts while also seeking funding
increases for immigration enforcement and veterans benefits. That means their
proposed cut would require dramatic cuts for domestic programs. Such a sharp
reduction might have a hard time passing the GOP-controlled House; even if it
did, the Democratic-controlled Senate would never pass it, and Biden would veto
it.
House Republican appropriators had
previously proposed $60 billion in cuts to these domestic programs, which would
bring spending on those programs to their lowest point as a share of the
economy in at least 60 years, according to Bobby Kogan, senior director of
federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think
tank. But that plan is regarded as insufficient by conservatives, who are
pushing for deeper cuts. This weekend, senior House Republicans were discussing
a proposal with cuts of as much as much as $175 billion, or roughly 25 percent.
Some Republicans have privately
bemoaned that many of their hard-right colleagues do not understand the
government funding process and only began to make more demands when bills were
nearly ready for a floor vote.
“I think more of these folks need
to have an [appropriations] 101 when they first get here,” moderate Rep. David
Joyce (R-Ohio) said earlier this month. “If you want to control the outcomes,
you have to work harder on the appropriations process.”
House Republicans are currently
fighting over just one step of many to fund the government. Some sort of
compromise with the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House will be
necessary to pass any spending legislation, whether for a short extension or to
cover the full fiscal year.
House flounders as GOP fails to appease hard-right members on funding
While some hard-right lawmakers
have tried to broker deals to fund
the government in the short-term — most notably Freedom Caucus Chair Scott
Perry (Pa.), Chip Roy (Tex.), and Byron Donalds (Fla.) — many holdouts remain
completely opposed to any stopgap bill, angry that the conference did not start
voting on the full fiscal year’s spending appropriation bills earlier. At the
same time, though, the far-right rebels have also inhibited that process by
blocking debate on two such bills in the last several months.
Several of the holdouts never
supported McCarthy as speaker, instead ultimately voting present to allow him
to win the post. Those members, most notably Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), continue
to threaten to try to push a motion to throw McCarthy out of the speakership,
greatly irritating a majority of the conference.
What to do if a federal government shutdown stops your paycheck
“We have been working on these
issues for months. And they are — anyone that says otherwise that this is some
sort of a last-minute deal is being disingenuous,” said one House Republican
negotiator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to express their discontent
with several colleagues. “Some people just have a personal issue that has
nothing to do with safeguarding the fiscal sanity of the country, or anything
else.”
Slashing just the parts of the
budget the House proposals focus on would do little to rein in the deficit as
other costs rise. The government is expected to spend $3 trillion more on
Social Security and health-care programs alone over the next decade, or more
than double the cost reductions achieved from the GOP plan.
“You could completely zero out
this entire pot of funding Republicans are talking about, and you wouldn’t put
the government on a sustainable trajectory moving forward,” said Ben Ritz,
director of the Public Policy Institute’s Center for Funding America’s future.
“It’s clearly not a serious attempt to stabilize the debt.”
Under former House speaker Paul D.
Ryan (R-Wis.), the GOP did try to rein in spending on Social Security and
Medicare, advancing plans to substantially lower the federal deficit. But those
proposals were unpopular with voters and have largely been abandoned by
McCarthy under pressure from former president Donald Trump, who saw
Social Security and Medicare cuts as political losers. Some conservatives have
pushed for the cuts to the smaller domestic programs as a necessary first step
to end “woke and weaponized bureaucracy,” which the right can then build on by
advancing more aggressive cuts.
And some budget experts also say
that while the GOP proposal wouldn’t erase the debt, more than $100 billion in
cuts could lead to $1 trillion in reduced spending over a decade.
“It’s not that much, but it’s not
nothing, especially over time,” said Marc Goldwein, a budget analyst at the
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
As a shutdown seems more and more
likely, House leaders are stressing to members that it could cost them
politically.
“I just believe if you’re not
funding the troops, and you’re not funding the border, it’s pretty difficult to
think that you’re going to win in a shutdown. I’ve been through those a couple
of times,” McCarthy told reporters on Friday.
GOP moderates have even started
negotiating with centrist Democrats in pursuit of a deal that could head off a
crisis.
“Shutting down the government is
not something that is appropriate,” said Joyce, of Ohio, who chairs the Republican
Governance Group that is talking with the New Democrat Coalition. “I mean,
people say they’re conservative and that they want to cut spending. Well,
government shutdowns cost taxpayers billions of dollars in 2013, 2018 and 2019.
It cost the government nearly $4 billion.”
That argument hasn’t swayed many
far-right members. Roy, from the House Freedom Caucus, scoffed at the idea that
reopening the government after a shutdown would cost too much to be worth it.
“There are rounding errors in our
ridiculous federal government that can [pay for] dealing with the in and out of
a shutdown,” he said. “Go take that out of your friggin’ IRS expansion and
leave me alone. I’m not worried about that. What I’m worried about is we
shouldn’t have to get there because what we should do is pass the
appropriations bill and do our job.”
What to know
about a possible government shutdown
The
latest: As a
federal government shutdown looms just days away, and so far,
Congress has yet to reach an agreement on funding. Here’s what
would be affected by a government shutdown.
What to
know: We explain the main
disagreements over federal spending and what
would happen if the government shuts down. Here’s what to
know about a possible government shutdown and what to
do if the shutdown stops your paycheck.
History
of shutdowns: Which
president had the most shutdowns? Here’s a look at the shortest
and longest government shutdowns in U.S. history.
ATTACHMENT
SEVENTEEN – From
Jimmy
Carter's 99th birthday celebrations moved due to chance of government shutdown
–get or url
ATTACHMENT
EIGHTEEN – From CNBC
BIDEN CALLS ON CONGRESS TO FUND GOVERNMENT AS MOODY’S AND WELLS FARGO
WARN OF SHUTDOWN EFFECTS
PUBLISHED TUE, SEP 26 20231:36 PM
EDTUPDATED TUE, SEP 26 20234:10 PM EDT
KEY POINTS
·
President Joe
Biden in a video posted on X reminded Americans of the budget deal he cut with
Republicans in the spring to keep government programs operating while cutting
the deficit more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
·
Government
funding is set to expire Sept. 30, leaving days for both chambers of Congress
to pass all 12 appropriations bills and Biden to sign.
·
Moody’s and
Wells Fargo cautioned that a government shutdown could harm the U.S. credit
rating and dollar.
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on
Tuesday asked Congress in a social media post to fund the government as warnings grew that a looming shutdown could harm the U.S. credit rating and dollar.
Biden in a video reminded Americans of the budget deal he cut with
congressional Republicans in the spring to keep government programs operating,
while cutting the deficit more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
“There’s a small group of extreme
House Republicans who don’t want to live up to that deal,” Biden said in the
video, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“So they’re determined to shut
down the government, shut it down now and it makes no sense,” the president
said. “I’m prepared to do my part, but the Republicans in the House of
Representatives refuse.”
“They refuse to stand up to the
extremists in their party, so now everyone in America could be forced to pay
the price,” Biden said.
Funding appropriation for federal
government operations is set to expire Saturday, leaving just days for Congress
to pass all 12 appropriations bills and Biden to sign.
The Republican-led House has only
managed to pass one such bill.
Failure to pass the remaining
bills would cause federal workers to be furloughed, agencies to shutter and
place many essential programs in peril.
The White House last month asked
Congress to pass a continuing resolution to keep the budget at current
levels and allow the government to remain open while negotiations continue.
Leaders of both parties in the
Senate have expressed support for that. But extremists in the House reject the
idea.
Moody’s and Wells Fargo warned
this week a shutdown would negatively affect the U.S. economy.
Moody’s, the only major credit rating
agency to still give U.S. sovereign credit a top AAA rating, on Monday said a
shutdown would affect that rating.
Another major credit rating
agency, Fitch, last month downgraded the U.S. long-term foreign-currency issuer default rating.
“A shutdown would be credit
negative for the U.S. sovereign,” Moody’s analysts wrote in a note.
“While government debt service
payments would not be impacted and a short-lived shutdown would be unlikely to
disrupt the economy, it would underscore the weakness of US institutional and
governance strength relative to other AAA-rated sovereigns that we have
highlighted in recent years.”
Moody’s added, “In particular, it
would demonstrate the significant constraints that intensifying political
polarization put on fiscal policymaking at a time of declining fiscal strength,
driven by widening fiscal deficits and deteriorating debt affordability.”
Wells Fargo analysts in a note
Tuesday said a shutdown could lead to the U.S. dollar index falling between 1%
and 1.5% in the upcoming weeks.
“A potential U.S. government
shutdown that could start October 1st looms, the chances of which are more or
less seen as a coin flip at this point,” Wells Fargo analysts wrote.
“Should a shutdown transpire,
there could be a negative impact of the U.S dollar, albeit one that is likely
to be modest and short-lived.”
ATTACHMENT
NINETEEN – From GUK
SENATE LEADERS REACH DEAL ON STOPGAP FUNDING BILL TO AVOID SHUTDOWN BUT
HOUSE FATE UNCERTAIN – LIVE
The 79-page stopgap spending bill would not include any border security measures, a
major sticking point for House Republicans
Timeline – Sept. 26th
Senate leaders
reach deal on stopgap funding bill to avoid shutdown
·
53m ago
Judge orders
some of Trump's business licenses to be rescinded
·
1h ago
Judge's ruling marks
major victory for New York attorney general's civil case against Trump
·
1h ago
Judge finds
Donald Trump committed fraud in New York civil case
·
3h ago
House and Senate
plan late afternoon votes to head off shutdown
·
4h ago
McCarthy says it
would be 'very important' to meet with Biden on averting shutdown
·
4h ago
·
5h ago
Biden endorses
striking workers' demands for higher wages
·
5h ago
Biden visits the
UAW picket line in Michigan
·
5h ago
'Pro-union'
Biden to make historic visit to UAW picket line in Michigan
·
6h ago
White House
spokeswoman avoids answering whether Biden believes Menendez should resign
·
7h ago
Fellow New Jersey
senator Booker calls on Menendez to resign over corruption indictment
·
8h ago
More Democratic
senators call on Menendez to resign following corruption indictment
·
8h ago
·
9h ago
·
9h ago
ATTACHMENT
TWENTY – From NBC
By Daniel Arkin
The head of the NAACP sent an open
letter to McCarthy forcefully calling on him to "swiftly resolve the
latest manufactured budget crisis and avoid a needless government shutdown that
would disproportionately harm millions of Black Americans."
In the letter, obtained by NBC News on Thursday
before it is distributed, NAACP president and chief executive Derrick Johnson
demands that Congress pass a continuing resolution that "rejects
unnecessary and draconian cuts" to federal social programs and services.
Johnson said a shutdown would
"risk disrupting" federal programs that aid Black families and
entrepreneurs, including Pell Grants, access to early childhood education
through Head Start, nutrition assistance, SBA small business loans, HUD housing
assistance and other services.
"Walking away from this deal
and opting instead to harm millions of Black families is not an option,"
Johnson said. "We will not forget your failure to act on behalf of the
American people to placate a handful of extremists."
ATTACHMENT
TWENTY ONE – From Forbes
TRUMP TELLS REPUBLICANS TO EMBRACE A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN TO PLACE BLAME
ON BIDEN
By Sara Dorn Sep 25, 2023,
10:38am EDT
Former President Donald Trump
urged Republicans to force a government shutdown if they don’t get “everything”
they’re asking for in the 2024 budget negotiations as lawmakers have just six
days to come to an agreement before the existing spending plan expires.
Trump told the GOP in a Truth Social post late Sunday to hold firm on their
demands for more border security and putting a stop to “election interference”
and the “weaponization” of the Justice Department, referring to his claims that
the agency is working on behalf of Democrats to prevent him from being
re-elected.
Trump told Republicans who are
worried they will be blamed for a shutdown that they’re “wrong!!!” and
predicted the public would instead blame “crooked (as hell!) Joe Biden.”
“It’s time Republicans learn how
to fight!” he wrote, while accusing Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.) of bowing to Democrats, calling him “the weakest, dumbest and most
conflicted ‘leader’ in U.S. Senate history.”
The post follows a similar push
from Trump on Wednesday, when he urged Republicans to shut down the government
if the budget doesn’t “defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized
Government,” referring to the Justice Department.
Biden’s campaign hit back at
Trump’s insistence last week that Republicans should oppose any budget that
does not limit funding for the Justice Department, accusing him of acting as
“MAGA House Republicans’ puppetmaster” in a statement from campaign
spokesperson TJ Ducklo. “Donald Trump is rooting for a government shutdown and
couldn’t care less what it would mean for American families,” Ducklo said,
adding “every American remembers the jobs lost and lives damaged by Donald
Trump’s extremism . . . and now he’s once again playing political games with
people’s lives by capitalizing on House Republicans’ weakness and doing
whatever it takes to regain power.”
The government shut down for the
longest period in history, 35 days, during Trump’s term, beginning in December
2018, over his demands for more border wall funding. Trump eventually agreed to
a short-term funding deal that did not include additional funding for a border
wall when the shutdown prompted nationwide flight delays as air traffic
controllers working without pay called in sick.
Congress must pass, and the
president must sign, 12 annual appropriations bills to keep the government up
and running before the current fiscal year expires at the end of September.
Far-right House Republicans have leveraged the GOP’s slim majority in the House
by threatening to withhold their votes on a fiscal year 2024 spending plan that
does not meet their demands. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has said she
will vote against any spending plan that includes funding for Ukraine. Rep.
Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), meanwhile, rallied other Republicans last week to oppose
the short-term spending deal, known as a continuing resolution, that a group of
House negotiators, backed by McCarthy, attempted to move forward in the House
last week. Any budget passed by the House, however, is expected to fail in the
Democratic-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is
seeking to pass a short-term deal that includes Ukraine funding.
Gaetz has threatened to call for
McCarthy’s ouster as speaker if he does not cave to the far-right’s demands for
the budget and meet the terms of the agreement he reached with right-wing
conservative holdouts to win the speaker election in January. Gaetz has said
McCarthy back-tracked on the deal by agreeing to a higher budget threshold
during the debt ceiling negotiations with Biden earlier this year and by
failing to put forth a vote on term limits for lawmakers, among other
grievances.
ATTACHMENT
TWENTY TWO – From
WashPost
U.S. GOVERNMENT STARTS NOTIFYING FEDERAL EMPLOYEES A SHUTDOWN MAY BE
IMMINENT
The official
warnings reflect Congress’s failure to extend funding past Saturday
By Tony Romm Updated September 28, 2023 at 11:41 a.m.
EDT|Published September 28, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
The U.S. government started
notifying federal workers on Thursday that a shutdown appears imminent,
as a Republican-led standoff on Capitol Hill forced the Biden administration to
embark on the formal, methodical process of preparing much of Washington to
come to a halt.
Get a curated selection of 10 of our
best stories in your inbox every weekend.
The messages acknowledged the
growing risk that millions of employees and military service members may stop
receiving pay in just three days, unless lawmakers in Congress can clinch a
last-minute — and increasingly unlikely — deal that would extend government
funding beyond Saturday.
The small group of House Republicans who might force a government
shutdown
“During this time, some of you
will be temporarily furloughed while others who perform excepted functions will
continue to execute your assigned duties,” read one of the notices, sent to
employees at the Department of Homeland Security and obtained by The Washington
Post.
“Our collective mission is of
great importance,” agency leaders continued, “and each and every one of you
contributes in meaningful ways to keeping our nation, the American people, and
our way of life secure.”
A shutdown would force the
government to pare back to only its most vital functions. The resulting disruptions are likely to
be significant, especially if the stalemate persists for weeks,
potentially dragging down the fragile U.S. economy while complicating many of
the services on which millions of Americans and businesses rely.
Some federal programs, including
Social Security and mail delivery, would be unaffected, because they are funded
outside of the annual appropriations process on Capitol Hill. But many other
government operations would be rendered inaccessible if funds expire —
resulting in closed parks and passport offices, and worrisome interruptions
affecting federal housing, food and health aid for the poor.
Caught in the middle are the
nation’s roughly 2 million federal workers and
its approximately 1.3 million active-duty troops. On Thursday morning, some
agencies began alerting many of these workers about the prospects of a funding
lapse, which means they cannot be paid for as long as Congress fails to come to
an agreement — though they would get paid back once any shutdown ends.
Members of the military are
expected to helm their posts even without pay, as are a select group of
civilian employees — such as bag-inspection agents at airports and federal law
enforcement officials — whose jobs are considered essential to public safety or
national security. But the Biden administration has yet to inform workers
individually if they are going to be furloughed or exempted from a shutdown,
adding to the anxieties of a political feud that has roiled the nation’s
capital.
Michael Linden, a former top
official at the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the early
notices reflected a political reality: Unlike past spending battles that
yielded an eleventh-hour deal, “the chances of a shutdown are much higher.”
“If you’re 48 hours out from a
potential shutdown, but it’s very clear there’s a [deal] on its path, then you
might not do that,” he said. “But if there isn’t, you are going to have to tell
agencies to tell their teams, so people can start to plan.”
As the federal government braced
for impact, lawmakers prepared to return to work Thursday no closer to
resolving their latest fiscal stalemate. In the Senate, Democrats and
Republicans inched closer to finalizing a bipartisan agreement that would fund
federal agencies into November, but it remained unclear if they could pass it
in time — or if the GOP-controlled House would even bother to consider it.
There, Speaker Kevin McCarthy
(R-Calif.) pledged anew this week that he would advance a stopgap that
addresses the demands of his far-right flank, including new border security
provisions that many Democrats oppose. Some conservatives have also demanded
deep spending cuts that Biden has rejected, while signaling they may not
support any temporary funding agreement, known as a continuing resolution, at
all.
Biden, for his part, told
attendees of a Democratic fundraising event in San Francisco on Wednesday night
that a shutdown would be “disastrous.” He called on Republicans earlier
Wednesday to extend government funding, warning that a lapse in federal funding
starting Sunday would jeopardize “a lot of vital work.”
Poor families could see cuts to food aid as Congress battles over budget
In recent weeks, his
administration has quietly prepared for a shutdown, instructing agencies to
update their plans for how they would proceed without funding. The official
blueprints suggest that congressional inaction could force the government to
halt some food and water inspections; slash nutrition aid to millions of poor
families; and imperil the provision of money to Florida, Puerto Rico and other
communities still reeling from major natural disasters.
The disruptions would only worsen
over time, especially if a shutdown next month rivals the last stoppage — a
34-day interruption starting in 2018 under President Donald Trump. Federal
workers who go weeks without pay might cease showing up, potentially snarling
air travel, while a series of programs that subsidize child care, college
financial aid and public housing would start to exhaust their cash reserves,
leaving lower-income Americans in a bind.
As a shutdown looms, see where federal employees live in the U.S.
Federal employees, in particular,
would face the “uncertainty of, ‘Will I ever make up for this lost paycheck?’”
said Democratic Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, whose Virginia district includes a
substantial number of government workers. The financial trouble could be more
pronounced for contractors that serve Washington, who are not guaranteed pay in
the event of a shutdown.
“The natural reaction for most
people is to pull back,” he said, as these families look to conserve money.
“You have this huge ripple effect from a shutdown that affects the economy writ
large.”
What to know
about a possible government shutdown
The latest: The U.S.
government has begun notifying federal workers that a shutdown appears imminent. Here’s how a shutdown will impact federal employees and contractors and
a look at the shortest and longest government shutdowns.
We break down how key federal services could be affected by a government
shutdown:
· Air travel, TSA and passports
· Medicare and Medicaid benefits
Federal workers: Here’s a federal worker’s shutdown survival guide and what to do if the shutdown stops your paycheck.
See where federal employees live in the United
States.
ATTACHMENT
TWENTY THREE – From Reuters headline @get
ATTACHMENT
TWENTY FOUR – From Reason
WILL THE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN RESULT IN 'HUNGER FOR MILLIONS' AS REUTERS
CLAIMS?
When you use
incorrect stats to bolster your claims, as Reuters did, all kinds of foolish
conclusions follow.
By LIZ WOLFE | 9.26.2023 2:00 PM
"Biden, US officials warn of
hunger for millions in a government shutdown," reads a Reuters
headline from yesterday. The article details how Agriculture Secretary Tom
Vilsack told reporters this week that the "vast majority" of the 7
million who receive benefits from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program
for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program will see their benefits
disappear after the government shuts down, which is likely to happen this
Saturday at midnight due to congressional inability to approve spending bills.
"Nearly half of U.S. newborns
rely on WIC, the USDA says,"
according to Reuters.
Just one problem: That's not true.
If you scroll down to Figure 6 on the
Department of Agriculture's helpful site, you can input your state
and see the current numbers as well as how those trends have changed over time.
The "coverage rate"—the number who participate in the program, out of
the total number who are eligible—hovers around roughly 50 percent. But half of
U.S. newborns are not eligible for WIC in the first place, as it is a
means-tested program designed to serve the poor, and half of newborns in the
United States are not in poverty or close to it.
In my state of New York, for
example, there were 1,449,500 children aged 0-4 and pregnant or postpartum
women (all of whom would be theoretically eligible for WIC, if meeting the need
requirement); of that total population, 48.7 percent would be eligible for the
program (so about 706,000), and about half of that number ends up actually
taking advantage of benefits (roughly 353,000).
For the record, other parts of the
USDA's site partially contradict that panel of information. During fiscal year
2022 (which may have seen an uptick due to pandemic-related disruptions),
WIC administered benefits
to "an estimated 39 percent of all infants in the United States."
This seems high to me given what we know about poverty statistics. It's hard to
get a straight answer, even using the agency's own data and infographics. But
one thing becomes clear: it is not true that half of U.S. newborns rely on this
means-tested government program, which is what Reuters claimed (albeit with the
handy hedge word nearly).
The official national poverty rate
as of 2022 hovered at around 11.5 percent, per Census Bureau
data. There are plenty of issues with how poverty gets measured in
the U.S. As I wrote recently
in Roundup:
Poverty in America is measured in
two ways: via the Official Poverty Measure (OPM), which uses cash and cash-like
government benefits (welfare and unemployment checks), and the Supplemental
Poverty Measure (SPM), which factors in food stamps and tax credits. Depending
on which measure you look at, you'll get a different sense of how dire (or not)
the situation is. For example, stimulus checks, expanded food stamp benefits,
and expanded child tax credits were counted only under the
SPM (not the OPM). When they expired last year, the poverty
rate (as counted by the SPM) rose.
But the buried lede in all of this
trouble with counting is that there are actually a lot of programs designed to
take care of the needs of the American poor. WIC, for example, tends to be
available to those with "a family income of at or below
185 percent of the U.S. poverty level"; 37 percent of
WIC recipients are also enrolled in Medicaid but not Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or SNAP; 31 percent of WIC recipients used
both Medicaid and SNAP but not TANF; 4 percent use all mentioned programs.
None of this is to downplay the
hardships or indignities of poverty. Rather, it is important for news outlets
to accurately report what is really happening on the ground so that we don't
have a warped sense of the scale of the country's problems. If fully half of
American infants are starving or in danger of it—and if that money will soon be
pulled because Congress can't agree on appropriations bills—that would be a
dire situation. Thankfully, that's not really what's happening, and there are
generally multiple welfare programs that serve these groups at once.
Even if the government shuts down
and WIC payments get temporarily suspended, the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (SNAP) will still continue to cut
checks for the needy, at least for the entire month of October,
for example. The longest government shutdown in history lasted for 34 days, so
it's likely that SNAP would have enough runway to continue to administer
benefits for the duration of the shutdown. Meanwhile, the Department of Housing
and Urban Development says that
it will continue to administer housing vouchers but that "the processing
or closing of FHA-insured loans may be delayed."
In other words: some of the
programs that poor people rely on to scrape by may be temporarily halted or
skeletal in staffing, but basic necessities will, in some form, remain
available. Media outlets and politicians looking to score points should not
claim otherwise.
ATTACHMENT
TWENTY FIVE – From Spectrum News
TRUMP URGES GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN AS MCCARTHY SCRAMBLES AHEAD OF WEEKEND
DEADLINE
By Joseph Konig And Angi
Gonzalez Washington, D.C. Updated 12:57 Pm Et Sep. 26, 2023 Published
7:19 Pm Et Sep. 25, 2023
With days to go before a Sept. 30 government
funding deadline that, if missed, would result in a shutdown of federal
agencies and the furloughing of millions of employees, little headway appears
to have been made as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy faces a revolt from his
majority’s right wing.
Hard-right members of the
Republican conference have said they prefer a government shutdown if their
policy demands are not met, no matter how likely those policies will be blocked
by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
What
You Need To Know
·
Little headway
appears to have been made ahead of a Sept. 30 government funding deadline as
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy faces a revolt from his majority’s right wing
·
A government
shutdown would result in the shuttering of federal agencies and the furloughing
of millions of employees
·
Pressure is
coming from the inside and outside of Congress, with former President Donald
Trump joining the calls of far-right rebels like Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida to
shut the government down if McCarthy does not make concessions
·
Trump, Gaetz and others want concessions on
immigration policies, money for Ukraine’s war effort, federal spending levels
and defunding the prosecutors pursuing criminal cases against the 2024 GOP
presidential primary frontrunner
·
The plan is for votes to be held beginning on
Tuesday on some appropriation bills. However, a short-term funding measure
known as a “continuing resolution” would likely be needed to ensure the whole
of the federal government has the money it needs to keep functioning past Sept.
30 until a more permanent agreement can be made
“If people want to close the
government, it only makes it weaker. Why would they want to stop paying the
troops or stop paying the border agents or the Coast Guard? I don't understand
how that makes you stronger, I don't understand what point you're trying to
make,” McCarthy told reporters on Monday. “Why would you want to stop paying
those individuals? I couldn't understand somebody that would want to do that.”
Pressure is coming from the inside
and outside of Congress, with former President Donald Trump joining the calls
of far-right rebels like Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida to shut the government down
if McCarthy does not make concessions on immigration policies, money for
Ukraine’s war effort, federal spending levels and defunding the prosecutors
pursuing criminal cases against the 2024 GOP presidential primary frontrunner.
“The Republicans lost big on Debt
Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the
Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed, in this case,
Crooked (as Hell!) Joe Biden!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media
network, on Sunday night. “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN! Close the
Border, stop the Weaponization of ‘Justice,’ and End Election Interference.”
Lawmakers were off on Monday, for
the Jewish holiday on Yom Kippur, but the plan is for votes to be held
beginning on Tuesday on some appropriation bills. However, a short-term funding
measure known as a “continuing resolution” would likely be needed to ensure the
whole of the federal government has the money it needs to keep functioning past
Sept. 30 until a more permanent agreement can be made. A vote on the Defense
Department budget, a typically unimpeded process, failed last week in a major
defeat for McCarthy.
For Gaetz and others, the Tuesday
votes — which will reportedly be for the Departments of
Defense, Homeland Security, State and Agriculture — are not enough.
Specifically, the Florida congressman wants votes on each of the 11 annual
spending bills, not one vote on an overarching deal. That process could take
weeks as House Republicans would need to sort out their own disputes before
reaching an agreement with the Senate.
“Kevin wants it in one big up or
down vote: keep the government open [or] shut it down. I'm saying
single-subject spending bills. It's the only way to break the fever and
liberate ourselves from this out of control spending,” Gaetz said on Fox News’
“Sunday Morning Futures” this weekend.
McCarthy has expressed his desire
to pass any funding measures with only Republican support — House Democrats
have universally declined to offer their support so far, opposing many of the
GOP’s priorities. If he turns to Democrats for support, he could face a vote to
end his speakership, as Gaetz and others have threatened.
In January, as part of his deal
with hard-right members of his party to secure the speakership after a historic
15 rounds of voting, McCarthy agreed to a House rule that allowed any one
member to bring a “motion to vacate,” which would trigger a vote on whether he
should be allowed to continue to lead the chamber.
“I'm not worried if someone makes
a motion. I'm not worried if somebody votes no. I'm going to wake up each and
every day with the same thing that drives my opinion of what needs to be done:
solving these problems,” McCarthy said on Monday. “I'm going to work with
people who want to get that done.”
Despite Trump’s assertions that
Biden and Democrats will be blamed for the shutdown, McCarthy has worked hard
to avoid one, arguing on Sunday in an interview with NBC News that “I think we
should show that we can govern.”
Gaetz himself placed the blame at
McCarthy’s feet and told a Fox News reporter last week
that Republicans couldn’t blame anyone besides the Speaker, specifically
absolving President Joe Biden, House Democrats or Senate Majority Leader Chuck
Schumer.
For their part, the White House
and Democrats are eager to make hay of Republicans’ dysfunction and the
potential consequences of a shutdown, with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
saying on Monday that “this is something for them to fix.”
“This is indeed a Republican
shutdown. So, they got to get to it. They got to fix it,” she said.
Later in the day at an unrelated
event, Biden said “funding the government is one of the most basic, fundamental
responsibilities of Congress and if Republicans in the House don’t start doing
their job, we should stop electing them.” He later shook his head when asked if
he had spoken to McCarthy recently and whether he planned to.
On Monday morning, the Biden
administration circulated state-by-state data for the seven million “vulnerable
moms and children” that rely on government assistance for food, noting the
Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
“serves nearly half of babies born in this country.” If the government shuts
down, the White House estimates the food assistance would dry up within days.
“During the course of a shutdown,
millions of those moms, babies, and young children would see a lack of
nutrition assistance,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak said at the White House
press briefing on Monday, estimating that WIC would last “a day or two” and
even states with funding reserves would likely run out within a week.
Separately, the Biden campaign
responded to Trump’s call for a shutdown on Monday by arguing he was doing so
for political gain even though shuttering many agencies “could delay cancer
research, force federal law enforcement and troops to work without pay, and
kneecap essential services.”
“House Republicans are gleefully
letting Donald Trump function as their chief political strategist at the
expense of American families,” campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said in a
statement. “Trump’s behavior is shameful, but unsurprising from someone who has
demonstrated he couldn’t care less about the American people.”
ATTACHMENT
TWENTY SIX – From HuffPost
Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell Facing Off In Government Shutdown
Showdown
Funding for federal operations is
set to lapse if Congress fails to act.
By Arthur
Delaney and Jonathan Nicholson Sep 27, 2023, 01:22 PM EDT
WASHINGTON — The top Republicans in the House and Senate don’t agree on how to
avert a government shutdown that is looking increasingly likely this weekend.
And if the government shuts down,
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has made clear who should get
the blame: the Republican-led House.
“The choice facing Congress, pretty
straightforward: We can take the standard approach and fund the government for
six weeks at the current rate of operations, or we can shut the government down
in exchange for zero meaningful progress on policy,” McConnell said Wednesday
morning on the floor of his chamber.
“Shutting down the government
isn’t an effective way to make a point. Keeping it open is the only way to make
a difference on the most important issues we are facing.”
As if he hadn’t been clear enough
in his morning remarks, McConnell revisited the topic of the House’s total
dysfunction during an afternoon press conference.
“Look, I don’t want to give the
speaker any advice about how to run the House,” McConnell said, referring to
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). “We’re going to concentrate on how to
do our job in the Senate, which is to pass a bill that keeps the government
open. I can’t have an impact on what happens in the House.”
President Joe Biden chimed
in to affirm the minority leader’s take on things.
“You know, I agree with Mitch
here,” Biden wrote in a social media post. “Why the House Republicans would
want to defund Border Patrol is beyond me.”
Late in the day, McCarthy tried to
downplay the divergence between himself and the Senate Republican leader.
“Mitch is not in the majority over
there. He’s got to work with Sen. Schumer,” McCarthy said, referring to
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
The Senate took the first step
Tuesday night toward passing a bipartisan bill that would fund the government
through Nov. 17, provide money for natural disaster relief and Ukraine’s
defense against Russian invaders, and extend some programs that would otherwise
be at risk, like the Federal Aviation Administration and food aid for pregnant
women.
McCarthy, meanwhile, told House
Republicans in a closed-door meeting Wednesday morning that he would not put
the Senate funding resolution up for a vote.
“He said he told McConnell he’s going to fight
what the Senate sends over,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) told reporters after
the meeting.
House Republicans said their plan
will be to pass a resolution funding the government at lower levels along with
a modified version of a hard-right immigration policy bill that the House passed
earlier this year in a symbolic vote.
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said the
idea is that the House would pass its bill on Friday and then Schumer “gets to
decide whether or not he wants to shut down the government or shut down the
border.”
One problem with the House
Republican plan is that it’s not clear if McCarthy can marshal the votes he would
need to pass a partisan funding bill. Republicans have struggled to pass
procedural resolutions for funding the military, likely their favorite part of
the federal government.
Another glaring point of
disagreement is the importance of providing help to Ukraine. President Joe
Biden has asked Congress for about $20 billion more in military, economic and
humanitarian aid for the embattled country. That would be on top of about $77
billion in aid that’s already been committed.
The Senate bill contains about
$6.1 billion in military and economic aid, a lowball figure for some Ukraine
advocates but enough to serve as a bridge to a larger amount later.
However, McCarthy on Tuesday night
warned that Ukraine would not be a priority in any stopgap bill emerging from
the House.
“What Russia has done is wrong,”
McCarthy told reporters. But he said helping Ukraine should not be more
important than assisting victims of natural disasters at home.
“Why can’t we deal with the border
and our emergencies too?” McCarthy asked. (The Senate bill includes $6 billion
in disaster relief funding, almost the same amount that would be provided to
help Ukraine.)
McConnell has said that defeating
Russia in Ukraine one of the most important tasks facing the Western world.
Earlier this month, he said cutting and running from Ukraine would have
consequences for deterring China from trying to take control of Taiwan.
“If the United States proves we cannot be
trusted to back our allies in Europe, why on earth should our allies in Asia
expect different treatment in the face of Chinese aggression?” he asked.
Ukraine allies overwhelmingly won
two votes on the House floor Wednesday on the issue of aid, potentially
undermining McCarthy’s case for keeping such spending out of a House stopgap
bill.
An amendment to a defense funding
bill that would have stripped $300 million in training assistance for Ukraine
was defeated on a 104-330
vote. Similarly, a blanket ban on using defense funds to provide security
assistance to Ukraine went down by an even bigger margin, 93 to 339.
ATTACHMENT
TWENTY SEVEN – From Breitbart
REP. MIKE JOHNSON: GOP
DOESN’T WANT GOV. SHUTDOWN BUT AMERICANS HAVE ‘HAD ENOUGH’ OF DESTRUCTIVE
DEMOCRAT POLICIES
Americans have “had enough” of Democrat
policies “destroying” our economy and security, according to House Republican
Conference Vice Chair Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who asserted that the GOP
seeks a change in how Washington works and is genuinely trying to prevent a
government shutdown.
Addressing the House on Tuesday, Rep.
Mike Johnson (R-LA) emphasized a shutdown is not something the Republican Party
wants.
“I just heard one of our colleagues over here suggest that somehow
Republicans are in favor of a government shutdown — no one desires a government
shutdown,” he stated.
“What we desire and what we are working towards is changing how Washington works,”
he explained. “That’s the commitment that we made to the American people;
that’s why they gave us the majority.”
This
fight is about changing the way Washington works — to force an end to the
reckless spending, corruption, weaponization of federal agencies, and open
borders that are destroying our country's liberty, opportunity, and security.
According to Rep. Johnson, that can only happen by changing the
“decades of reckless spending and corruption,” as he called for various other
changes.
“We
have to change the weaponization of the federal agencies that are designed to
protect and serve the American people and instead are being used against them.
We have to change the opening of the borders that is destroying our communities
and contributing to the rising crime wave. We have to change the way that the
Biden administration is administering the economy,” he argued.
We have to change the radical shift, the forced transition, that
they’re trying to push us into [with] this radical green energy transition —
it’s nonsense,” the conservative lawmaker added.
He concluded by noting that the American people “have had
enough.”
“They see the Democrat policies
destroying our economy, destroying our security, destroying opportunity for
their children and grandchildren — and we are taking a stand here,” the GOP
representative stated.
“We’re operating in good faith [and] we’re negotiating together
for the best outcome for the people and we do not desire a shutdown,” he added.
The matter comes as both the Congress and the White House have
until Saturday to reach a consensus on the budgetary legislation to support the
government in order to avoid a shutdown.
On Monday, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) weighed in on the possibility of a federal
government shutdown, saying she gives the scenario a 50-50 chance of occurring.
In the event of a shutdown, the South Carolina Republican lawmaker
expressed her belief that Republicans would take the fall.
“Well, it’s always going to be blamed on the Republicans,” she said. “But if
you are watching and you’re paying attention to what the federal government and
Congress has done over the last 20 or 30 years, you would know that this
problem was created by both sides of the aisle.”
“And if we avoid a shutdown, it’ll be because Republicans teamed
up with Democrats to spend more money than ever in the history of the United
States to keep the government open,” she added. “And so that’s where I have a
lot of concern and trepidation and frustration that all of this could have been
avoided with leadership on spending.”
ATTACHMENT
TWENTY EIGHT – From GUK
SENATE LEADERS REACH DEAL ON STOPGAP FUNDING
BILL TO AVOID SHUTDOWN
By Léonie
Chao-Fong (now) and Chris
Stein (earlier) Tue 26 Sep 2023
17.51 EDT
The Senate
majority leader, Chuck
Schumer, and the
Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, reached an agreement on a stopgap
spending plan that would keep the government open past Saturday.
A bipartisan
Senate draft measure would fund the government through 17 November and include
around $6bn in new aid to Ukraine and roughly $6bn in disaster funding, Reuters
reported.
Speaking
earlier today, Schumer said:
We will
continue to fund the government at present levels while maintaining our
commitment to Ukraine’s security and humanitarian needs, while also ensuring
those impacted by natural disasters across the country begin to get the resources
they need.
Updated at
17.43 EDT
The 79-page stopgap spending
bill, unveiled by the Senate majority leader, Chuck
Schumer, and the
Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, would not include any border security
measures, a major sticking point for House Republicans, Reuters reported.
The short-term bill would avert a
government shutdown on Sunday while also providing billions in disaster relief
and aid to Ukraine.
The bill includes $4.5bn from an
operations and maintenance fund for the defense department “to remain available
until Sept. 30, 2024 to respond to the situation in Ukraine,” according to the
measure’s text.
The bill also includes another
$1.65bn in state department funding for additional assistance to Ukraine that
would be available until 30 September 2025.
·
·
Updated at 17.51 EDT
Senate
leaders reach deal on stopgap funding bill to avoid shutdown
The Senate majority leader, Chuck
Schumer, and the
Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, reached an agreement on a stopgap
spending plan that would keep the government open past Saturday.
A bipartisan Senate draft measure
would fund the government through 17 November and include around $6bn in new
aid to Ukraine and roughly $6bn in disaster funding, Reuters reported.
Speaking earlier today, Schumer
said:
We will continue to fund the
government at present levels while maintaining our commitment to Ukraine’s
security and humanitarian needs, while also ensuring those impacted by natural
disasters across the country begin to get the resources they need.
·
·
Updated at 17.43 EDT
Joe Biden’s dog, Commander, bit
another Secret Service agent at the White House on Monday.
In a statement to
CNN, a spokesperson, Anthony Guglielmi, said:
Yesterday around 8pm, a Secret
Service Uniformed Division police officer came in contact with a First Family
pet and was bitten. The officer was treated by medical personnel on complex.
Commander has been involved in at
least 11 biting incidents at the White House and at the Biden family home in
Delaware. One such incident in November 2022 left an officer hospitalized after
being bitten on the arms and thighs.
Another of the president’s dogs,
Major, was removed from the White House and relocated to Delaware following
several reported biting incidents.
Updated at 17.25 EDT
Judge orders
some of Trump's business licenses to be rescinded
Ruling in a civil lawsuit brought
by the New York attorney general Letitia James, Judge
Arthur Engoron ordered
that some of Donald
Trump’s business
licenses be rescinded as punishment after finding the former president
committed fraud by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net
worth.
The judge also said he would
continue to have an independent monitor oversee the Trump Organization’s
operations.
James sued Trump and his adult
sons last year, alleging widespread fraud connected to the Trump Organization
and seeking $250m and professional sanctions. She has said Trump inflated his
net worth by as much as $2.23bn, and by one measure as much as $3.6bn, on
annual financial statements given to banks and insurers.
Assets whose values were inflated
included Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, his penthouse apartment in
Manhattan’s Trump Tower, and various office buildings and golf courses, she
said.
In his ruling, Judge Engoron said
James had established liability for false valuations of several properties,
Mar-a-Lago and the penthouse. He wrote:
In defendants’ world: rent
regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted
land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into
thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party
exonerates the other party’s lies. That is a is a fantasy world, not the real world.
·
·
Updated at 17.25 EDT
Judge's
ruling marks major victory for New York attorney general's civil case against
Trump
Judge Arthur F Engoron’s ruling marks
a major victory for New York attorney general Letitia James’s civil case
against Donald Trump.
In the civil fraud suit, James is
suing Trump, his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric
Trump, and
the Trump
Organization for
$250m.
Today’s ruling, in a phase of the case
known as summary judgment, resolves the key claim in James’s lawsuit, but six
others remain.
Trump has repeatedly sought to
delay or throw out the case, and has repeatedly been rejected. He has also sued
the judge, with an appeals court expected to rule this week on his lawsuit.
·
·
Updated at 17.23 EDT
Judge finds
Donald Trump committed fraud in New York civil case
A New York state judge has granted
partial summary judgment to the New York attorney general, Letitia
James, in the
civil case against Donald
Trump.
Judge Arthur F. Engoron found that
Trump committed fraud for years while building his real estate empire, and that
the former president and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by
massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork
used in making deals and securing financing, AP reports:
Beyond mere bragging about his
riches, Trump, his company and key executives repeatedly lied about them on his
annual financial statements, reaping rewards such as favorable loan terms and
lower insurance premiums, Engoron found.
Those tactics crossed a line and
violated the law, the judge said in his ruling on Tuesday.
The decision by Judge Engoron precedes
a trial that is scheduled to begin on Monday. James, a Democrat, sued Trump and
his adult sons last year, alleging widespread fraud connected to the Trump
Organization and seeking $250m and professional sanctions.
·
·
Updated at 16.47 EDT
Joe Biden has warned that
Americans could be “forced to pay the price” because House Republicans “refuse to stand up to
the extremists in their party”.
As the House standoff stretches
on, the White House has accused Republicans of playing politics at the expense
of the American people.
Biden tweeted:
·
·
For an idea of the state of
play in the House, consider what Republican speaker Kevin
McCarthy said to CNN when asked
how he would pass a short-term funding measure through the chamber, despite
opposition from his own party.
McCarthy has not said if he will
put the bill expected to pass the Senate today up for a vote in the House, but
if he does, it’s possible it won’t win enough votes from Republicans to pass, assuming Democrats also vote
against it.
Asked to comment on how he’d get
around this opposition, McCarthy deflected, and accused Republican detractors of,
bizarrely, aligning themselves with Joe Biden. Here’s more from CNN, on why he
said that:
·
·
Updated at 16.02 EDT
In a marked contrast to the
rancor and dysfunction gripping the House, the Senate’s top Republican, Mitch
McConnell, also endorsed the short-term government funding bill up for a vote
today, Politico reports:
McConnell’s comments are yet
another positive sign it’ll pass the chamber, and head to an uncertain fate in
the House.
·
·
Updated at 15.52 EDT
The Senate’s Democratic
leader, Chuck Schumer, says he expects a short-term government funding
measure to pass his chamber with bipartisan support, Politico reports:
The question is: what reception
will it get in the House? If speaker Kevin McCarthy puts the bill up for a vote, it
may attract enough Democratic votes to offset any defections from rightwing
Republicans. But those insurgents have made clear that any collaboration
between McCarthy and Democrats will result in them holding a vote to remove him
as speaker.
·
·
Updated at 15.42 EDT
House and
Senate plan late afternoon votes to head off shutdown
The House and Senate will in a few
hours hold votes that will be crucial to the broader effort to stop the
government from shutting down at the end of the week.
The federal fiscal year ends on 30
September, after which many federal agencies will have exhausted their funding
and have to curtail services or shut down entirely until Congress reauthorizes
their spending. But lawmakers have failed to pass bills authorizing the
government’s spending into October due to a range of disagreements between
them, with the most pronounced split being between House Republicans who back
speaker Kevin
McCarthy and a
small group of rightwing insurgents who have blocked the chamber from
considering a measure to fund the government for a short period beyond the end
of the month.
At 5.30pm, the
Democratic-dominated Senate will vote on a bill that extends funding for a
short period of time, but lacks any new money for Ukraine or disaster relief
that Joe
Biden’s allies
have requested. Those exclusions are seen as a bid to win support in the
Republican-led House.
The House is meanwhile taking
procedural votes on four long-term spending bills. If the votes succeed, it
could be a sign that McCarthy has won over some of his detractors – but that
alone won’t be enough to keep the government open.
·
·
Updated at 15.21 EDT
As GOP House speaker Kevin
McCarthy mulls a meeting with Joe Biden to resolve the possibility that the
federal government will shut down at the end of this week, here’s the
Guardian’s Joan E Greve with
the latest on the chaotic negotiations between Republicans and Democrats in
both chambers of Congress on preventing it:
With just five days left to avert
a federal shutdown, the House and the Senate return on Tuesday to resume their
tense budget negotiations in the hope of cobbling together a last-minute
agreement to keep the government open.
The House will take action on four
appropriations bills, which would address longer-term government funding needs
but would not specifically help avoid a shutdown on 1 October.
The four bills include further
funding cuts demanded by the hard-right House members who have refused to back
a stopgap spending bill, known as a continuing resolution, that would prevent a
shutdown.
The House is expected to take a
procedural vote on those four bills on Tuesday. If that vote is successful, the
House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy,
may attempt to use the victory as leverage with the hard-right members of his
conference to convince them to back a continuing resolution.
But it remains unclear whether
those four appropriations bills can win enough support to clear the procedural
vote, given that one of the holdout Republicans, Marjorie
Taylor Greene of Georgia, has said she will not back the spending package
because it includes funding for Ukraine.
Congress
returns with only days left to avert federal government shutdown
·
·
Updated at 14.58 EDT
By Oliver Milman
Donald Trump has launched a
lengthy and largely baseless attack on wind turbines for causing large numbers of
whales to die, claiming that “windmills” are making the cetaceans “crazy” and
“a little batty”.
Trump, the frontrunner for the
Republican presidential nomination, used a rally in South Carolina to assert
that while there was only a small chance of killing a whale by hitting it with
a boat, “their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen
before. No one does anything about that.”
“They are washing up ashore,” said
Trump, the twice-impeached former US president and gameshow host who is facing
multiple criminal indictments.
You wouldn’t see that once a year
– now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them
crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.
Trump has a history of making
false or exaggerated claims about renewable energy, previously asserting that
the noise from wind turbines can cause cancer, and that the structures “kill
all the birds”. In that case, experts say there is no proven link to
ill health from wind turbines, and that there are far greater causes of
avian deaths, such as cats or fossil fuel infrastructure. There is also little
to support Trump’s foray into whale science.
·
·
Updated at 14.40 EDT
McCarthy says
it would be 'very important' to meet with Biden on averting shutdown
The House speaker, Kevin
McCarthy, said it would be “very important”
to meet with Joe
Biden to avert
a government shutdown, and suggested the president could solve the crisis at
the southern border unilaterally.
Asked why he was not willing to
strike a deal with congressional Democrats on a short-term funding bill to keep
the government open, NBC reports that
McCarthy replied:
Why don’t we just cut a deal with
the president?
He added:
The president, all he has to do … it’s
only actions that he has to take. He can do it like that. He changed all the
policies on the border. He can change those. We can keep government open and
finish out the work that we have done.
Asked if he was requesting a
meeting with Biden, McCarthy said:
I think it would be very important
to have a meeting with the president to solve that issue.
·
·
Updated at 14.41 EDT
Here’s a clip of Joe
Biden’s remarks as
he joined striking United Auto Workers members (UAW) outside a plant in
Michigan.
Addressing the picketing workers,
the president said they had made a lot of sacrifices when their companies were
in trouble. He added:
Now they’re doing incredibly well.
And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well, too.
Asked if the UAW should get a 40%
increase, Biden said yes.
12
'You deserve the raise': Joe
Biden becomes first sitting US president to join picket line – video
·
·
Updated at 14.04 EDT
The day so
far
Joe
Biden became
the first sitting US president in modern memory to visit a union picket line,
traveling to Van Buren township, Michigan, to address United Auto Workers
members who have walked off the job at the big three automakers. The president
argued that the workers deserve higher wages,
and appeared alongside the union’s leader, Shawn Fain – who has yet to endorse
Biden’s re-election bid. Back in Washington DC, Congress is as troubled as
ever. The leaders of the House and Senate are trying to avoid a
government shutdown, but there’s no telling if their plans
will work. Meanwhile, more and more Democratic
senators say Bob
Menendez should
resign his seat after being indicted on corruption charges, including his
fellow Jerseyman, Cory Booker.
Here’s what else is going on:
·
Hunter
Biden’s latest
salvo in his campaign of lawsuits is against Rudy Giuliani and another lawyer, whom he accuses of violating his
privacy by going through his digital devices.
·
The supreme court told Alabama’s Republican
leaders that
they have to draw another majority-Black congressional district. They tried
very hard to get out of doing so.
·
Here’s everything you need to know about the UAW’s leader, Shawn Fain.
·
·
Updated at 13.51 EDT
Here was the scene in Van Buren
township, Michigan, as Joe Biden visited striking United Auto Workers
members, in the first visit to a picket line by a US president:
Looming shutdown
Congress returns with only days
left to avert federal government shutdown
Congressional
Republicans are trapped in a dangerous absurdity of their own making
ATTACHMENT
TWENTY NINE – From the Washington Examiner
SENATE
BILL PROPOSED
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Senate Democrats and Republicans worked
over the weekend on a stopgap
bill and struck a deal on Tuesday, calling it a "good,
sensible and bipartisan bill.”
“This bipartisan CR is a temporary
solution, a bridge toward cooperation and away from extremism,” Schumer said
during a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday afternoon. “It will allow us to
keep working to fully fund the federal government and spare American families
the pain of a shutdown.”
ATTACHMENT
THIRTY – From the NY POST
MCCARTHY HOPES FOR A MIRACLE AS CONGRESS RETURNS TO SHUTDOWN ROW: ‘I’M
A BELIEVER’
Story by Ryan King
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is
holding out hope for a breakthrough as the nation barrels toward a partial government shutdown in five days.
The House and Senate will be back
in session Tuesday after taking an extended break for a three-day weekend and the Jewish holiday of
Yom Kippur with all eyes on McCarthy to find a way to break the deadlock in his
chamber.
“Look, I’m a believer in
everything,” the speaker told reporters Monday. “I never
give up.”
McCarthy plans to continue his
push for a stopgap spending bill this week to temporarily keep the government
fully open while simultaneously plowing ahead with individual appropriations
bills meant to fund operations through next year.
His prior attempts went down to
defeat last week, with five Republican rebels joining House Democrats to block
the advancement of any spending measure.
Democrats have been slow to throw
McCarthy a lifeline and he seems reluctant to accept one as GOP rebels dangle a
motion to oust him.
A huge majority of Kevin
McCarthy’s Republican conference favors a CR to avert a shutdown, but a small
band of holdouts are staunchly opposed.
“I’ve never seen a group that is
as hellbent on a shutdown as these crazy MAGA Republicans — that small
group,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told CNN last
week.
“I am still hopeful. I am still
optimistic that once the Senate acts in a bipartisan [way] … that maybe the
House will follow our example.”
Schumer has signaled that he may work with
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to pass a spending patch, which
would likely need 60 votes.
Chuck Schumer has been working
with his Republican colleagues to gauge interest in CR, which is expected to
have little to no strings attached.
At that point, McCarthy would be
given the choice of whether or not to take that up for a vote in the House and
roil his right flank.
However, the Senate has also been
unable to pass any appropriation bills so far after a so-called “minibus”
package went down to defeat last week.
Meanwhile, the White House —
facing polls showing Americans dissatisfied with President Biden — has ramped
up their attacks on the Capitol Hill GOP.
“This will be a Republican
shutdown,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted to reporters
Monday. “This shouldn’t be happening.”
An ABC-Washington Post survey released Sunday
found that 40% of registered voters would primarily blame Democrats for a
government shutdown, while 33% would blame Republicans. The Washington Post
dubbed its own poll an “outlier.”
Over the weekend, top House Republicans reportedly drafted
another stopgap continuing resolution featuring even more dramatic cuts than
the one previously brokered by the conservative Freedom Caucus and more
centrist Main Street Caucus.
The newer version would see a 27%
reduction in non-Pentagon and non-Veterans Affairs discretionary
spending, according to Bloomberg, up from the 8%
reduction from the prior deal — and all but ensuring its failure in the Senate
or veto by Biden.
While the Freedom Caucus-Main
Street Caucus compromise would have funded the government through Oct. 31, the
pitch unveiled over the weekend would have kept the lights on through Nov. 15.
Matt Gaetz is reportedly mulling a
run for Florida governor.
McCarthy’s delicate attempt to
peel off GOP rebels took a body blow Sunday from former President Donald Trump,
who wrote on Truth Social of a potential shutdown: “Whoever
is President will be blamed, in this case, Crooked (as Hell!) Joe Biden!”
“UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT
IT DOWN!” he added in all caps.
Hard-liners like McCarthy’s chief
GOP agitator, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) have been adamant that they won’t vote
for any continuing resolution at all.
Republican presidential hopefuls
are chiming in on the impasse as well. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has encouraged
the dissenters to stand strong, while former Ambassador to the United Nations
Nikki Haley argued Monday a partial shutdown would only hurt taxpayers.
The White House has been keen on
making political repercussions of a shutdown as painful for Republicans as
possible.Getty Images
“It is irresponsible and
inexcusable that you would let government shut down. It is also irresponsible
and inexcusable to not cut all of the spending,” she told Bloomberg Television.
Moderate Republicans are fearful
of political blowback for a shutdown, but hard-liners appear to believe they’ll
reap the political rewards.
“People in my district are willing
to shut the government down for more conservative fiscal policy to put us on a
path to balancing our budget at least in ten years,” Rep. Greg Steube
(R-Fla.) told Fox News Sunday night.
Marjorie Taylor Greene helped
Kevin McCarthy win the speakership back in January, but is drawing a hard line
on aid to Ukraine.
“I think that the only way that a
CR passes is with Democratic votes,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) told Semafor.
With a CR bill drafted, but out of
reach for now, McCarthy is trying to move forward with the appropriations
bills, the traditional avenue for funding the government.
He previously pledged to pass all
12 of them individually, a key demand from Gaetz and other hard-right lawmakers
during the marathon battle for the Speaker’s gavel in January. So far, the
House has only passed one.
A government shutdown would likely
cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
But holdout Rep. Marjorie Taylor
Greene (R-Ga.) is foiling plans to advance the rest, vowing
to vote against the rules for those bills until aid to Ukraine
is removed entirely.
Meanwhile, Rep. Tim Burchett
(R-Tenn.) expressed openness to backing a motion to vacate the
chair and oust McCarthy — something Gaetz has openly threatened to introduce.
With Republicans only holding a
four-seat majority in the House, that could pose an existential threat to
McCarthy’s speakership.
“I’m not worrying if someone makes
a motion,” McCarthy told reporters Monday. “I’m not worried if somebody votes
no. I’m going to wake up each day with the same thing that drives my opinion of
what needs to be done.”
ATTACHMENT
THIRTY ONE – From Reuters
SHUTDOWN ODDS GROW AS SENATE, HOUSE ADVANCE SEPARATE SPENDING PLANS
By David
Morgan and Moira Warburton September
28, 20234:46 PM
WASHINGTON, Sept 28 (Reuters) -
The Democratic-led U.S. Senate forged ahead on Thursday with a bipartisan
stopgap funding bill aimed at averting a fourth partial
government shutdown in a decade, while the House prepared to
vote on partisan Republican spending bills with no chance of becoming law.
The divergent paths of the two
chambers appeared to increase the odds that federal agencies will run out of
money on Sunday, furloughing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and
halting a wide range of services from economic data releases to nutrition
benefits.
The Senate voted 76-22 to open
debate on a stopgap bill known as a continuing resolution, or CR, which would
extend federal spending until Nov. 17, and authorize roughly $6 billion each
for domestic disaster response funding and aid to Ukraine to defend itself
against Russia.
The Senate measure has already
been rejected by Republicans, who control the House of Representatives.
The House planned late-night votes
on four partisan appropriations bills that would not alone prevent a shutdown,
even if they could overcome strong opposition from Democrats and become law.
House Republicans, led by a small
faction of hardline conservatives in the chamber they control by a 221-212
margin, have rejected spending levels for fiscal year 2024 set in a deal
Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated with Biden in May.
The agreement included $1.59
trillion in discretionary spending in fiscal 2024. House Republicans are
demanding another $120 billion in cuts, plus tougher legislation that would
stop the flow of immigrants at the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
The funding fight focuses on a
relatively small slice of the $6.4 trillion U.S. budget for this fiscal year.
Lawmakers are not considering cuts to popular benefit programs such as Social
Security and Medicare.
McCarthy is facing intense
pressure from his caucus to achieve their goals. Several hardliners have threatened
to oust him from his leadership role if he passes a spending
bill that requires any Democratic votes to pass.
Former President Donald Trump has
taken to social media to push his congressional allies toward a shutdown.
McCarthy, for his part, suggested
on Thursday that a shutdown could be avoided if Senate Democrats agreed to
address border issues in their stopgap measure.
"I talked this morning to
some Democratic senators over there that are more aligned with what we want to
do. They want to do something about the border," McCarthy told reporters
in the U.S. Capitol.
"We're trying to work to see,
could we put some border provisions in that current Senate bill that would
actually make things a lot better," he said.
The House Freedom Caucus, home to
the hardliners forcing McCarthy's hand, in an open letter to him on Thursday
demanded a timeline for passing the seven remaining appropriations bills and a
plan to further reduce the top-line discretionary spending figure, among other
questions.
"No Member of Congress can or
should be expected to consider supporting a stop-gap funding measure without
answers to these reasonable questions," the letter, led by the group's
chair, Republican Representative Scott Perry, read.
The Senate measure has passed two
procedural hurdles this week with strong bipartisan support.
"Congress has only one option
- one option - to avoid a shutdown: bipartisanship," Senate Majority
Leader Chuck Schumer said on Thursday. "With bipartisanship, we can
responsibly fund the government and avoid the sharp and unnecessary pain for
the American people and the economy that a shutdown will bring."
Without a bipartisan agreement
between senators to expedite its parliamentary process, the Senate is unlikely to
act on its stopgap measure until after the government shuts down.
Credit agencies have warned that
brinkmanship and political polarization are harming the U.S. financial outlook.
Moody's, the last major ratings agency to rate the U.S. government
"Aaa" with a stable outlook, said on Monday that a shutdown would
harm the country's credit rating.
Fitch, another major ratings
agency, already
downgraded the U.S. government to "AA+" after
Congress flirted with defaulting on the nation's debt earlier this year.
Most of Congress - including many
Senate Republicans - has largely rejected House Republicans' attempts to make
the situation at the border with Mexico the focus of the shutdown.
"We can take the standard
approach and fund the government for six weeks at the current rate of
operations, or we can shut the government down in exchange for zero meaningful
progress on policy," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on
Wednesday.
The House is expected to vote on
Friday on its own short-term funding measure. The continuing resolution's
success could depend on whether House Republicans can pass fiscal 2024 spending
bills for homeland security, defense, agriculture, and State Department and
foreign operations in a voting session expected to end after midnight on
Thursday.
Three of the bills - defense,
foreign operations and agriculture - are opposed by some Republicans, lawmakers
said.
The House continuing resolution is
expected to include conservative Republican border restrictions that will not
pass the Senate, meaning the risk of a shutdown remains high.
For
charts and graphs:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-house-hold-procedural-votes-partial-government-shutdown-looms-2023-09-28/
ATTACHMENT THIRTY TWO – From Reason
SHUT IT ALL DOWN
Plus: Nonessential
government programs (all of them?), AI firefighting, tech-world hit pieces, and
more...
LIZ WOLFE | 9.26.2023 9:30 AM
At midnight on Saturday, the
fiscal year ends. Congress has not passed the bills it needs to in order to
fund the government for another year, which means a group of Democratic
senators are eyeing a temporary measure—called a continuing resolution—to
keep the government up and running while negotiations continue. But a
significant sticking point in the existing spending feud is $25 billion in new
funding for the Ukraine defense effort, which several vocal
House Republicans oppose.
Excluding "contentious
provisions" like that line item would allow it to "be a 'clean'
measure that might enjoy broader support among Republicans in the House, which
also have to pass it to keep the government open," reports The
New York Times. Some senators reportedly personally assured Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week during his visit that American aid to
Ukraine would not cease, but others fear that will sink the bill when there's
no time to waste.
Besides, "even if the Senate
is able to assemble and pass a temporary spending measure in the next few days,
it is uncertain whether [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy would even bring the
legislation to a vote," adds The
New York Times. "Doing so would be likely to provoke a formal challenge
to his hold on the speakership, presenting him with a choice between keeping
the government open or igniting a fight for his job."
So what?
What's wrong with a government shutdown? This whole fight is about more than just
McCarthy keeping his job; people ostensibly depend on the federal government to
provide services that matter to them, or so the argument goes.
Of course, a shutdown
doesn't actually mean the federal government fully grinds to a
halt (be still, my heart); instead, services deemed
nonessential are suspended (like Food and Drug Administration
inspections; administration of Medicare and Social Security programs but not
actually cutting the checks) while services considered essential (air traffic
control, border protection, law enforcement, maintaining the power grid, that
dreaded IRS with its new infusion of cash from that time Congress
singlehandedly stopped
inflation with a well-named bill, and a long list of other things)
carry on. Federal employees get temporarily furloughed, with backpay paid
later.
In short: Not all that much
actually happens, and an astonishing number of government programs are
considered essential. In some cases, the calls as to what's
"essential" vs. "nonessential" are bizarre: WIC gets shut
down but SNAP continues issuing
benefits, for example.
There are some knock-on effects to
such disruptions. During the 2013 shutdown, for example, people were turned
away en masse from national parks which resulted in lost revenue and a funding
crunch later on. During the 2018–2019 shutdown, a lot of TSA agents and a few air traffic
controllers refused to show up for work, which created major
travel issues and shut down all of New York's LaGuardia airport for a time.
Generally speaking, though, government shutdowns don't affect people's
day-to-day lives as much as some in the
media claim and, since so much of the government stays running
and so many government employees end up still getting their paychecks, they're
a bit of a misnomer.
In fact, I have some candidates
for agencies we could shutter (forever): the TSA,
with its 80-95 percent
failure rate at detecting explosives and weapons, would be a
great candidate. (Just saved the government $10 billion annually.)
Maybe the Environmental Protection Agency, which keeps trying to regulate
carbon emissions and power plants to little effect, and which stands in the way
of controlled burns.
(Just saved another $10
billion, you're welcome).
ATTACHMENT
THIRTY THREE – From Yahoo/Daily Beast
GAETZ NOW ACTS THE MARTYR AS THE SHUTDOWN DUMPSTER FIRE HE FUELED LOOMS
By AJ
McDougall Tue, September 26, 2023 at 5:40 PM EDT·
With little headway being made in
negotiations to keep the government’s lights on beyond the end of the
week, a shutdown seems all
but assured, with Congress shifting into crisis mode as President Joe
Biden calls directly on Republicans to help avoid disaster. Rather than
respond to that call, however, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) busied himself
on Tuesday preparing a request to have his salary withheld until funding is
secured.
“It is my understanding that
pursuant to the Constitution, members of Congress will continue to receive
their pay during a lapse in appropriations,” Gaetz wrote in the letter to the
House’s chief administrative officer.
“Therefore, I am requesting that
in the case of a lapse of appropriations beginning at 12:00 a.m. on October 1,
2023, my pay be withheld until legislation has taken effect to end such lapse
in appropriations in its entirety.”
The letter was obtained by the
conservative Daily Caller, with Gaetz
confirming it on social media shortly after.
Despite the sense of doom seeping
into the halls of the Capitol, the Florida Republican has remained cavalier
about the prospect of a shutdown. “I think it would be a shutdown we could
endure,” he told reporters last week. “We would have
to own it. We would have to hold accountable the leaders who brought it.”
He is also one of a number of
hardline conservatives threatening to stonewall any effort to secure any
short-term funding extension, known as continuing resolutions, in the hopes
that it will force Congress to pass all 12 single-subject appropriations bills
post-shutdown.
Without Gaetz and his allies,
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) doesn’t have the votes to ram any
stopgap measure through the House—and should McCarthy try to team up with the
Democrats, Gaetz has promised to bring a motion to dethrone him.
Even Fox’s Maria Bartiromo Thinks
Matt Gaetz Is Going a Little Overboard
On Tuesday, McCarthy still seemed
unreceptive to the idea of reaching across the aisle. “I believe we have a
majority here, and we can work together to solve this. It might take us a
little longer, but this is important,” he told NBC News. “We want to make
sure we can end the wasteful spending that the Democrats have put forth.”
In lieu of congressional
bipartisanship, McCarthy is turning to Biden as a potential savior—or at least
someone to blame, should the shutdown come to pass. McCarthy began pushing
Tuesday for a sit-down with the president, insinuating that Biden might be
easier to work with than the Democrats. “Why don’t we just cut a deal with the
president?” McCarthy asked reporters, saying it was “very important” to get a
meeting on the books.
“Listen, the president, all he has
to do… it’s only actions that he has to take. He can do it like that. He
changed all the policies on the border. He can change those,” McCarthy said,
according to NBC. “We can keep [the]
government open and finish out the work that we have done.”
In a series of tweets on Tuesday,
however, Biden made it clear he expected Republicans to sort their own mess
out. “We could be facing a government shutdown if Republicans in the House
don’t do their job,” he wrote in one. “Speaker McCarthy and I came to an agreement on
spending levels for the government a few months ago.”
“But now,” he continued, “House
Republicans refuse to stand up to the extremists in their party—and everyone in
America could be forced to pay the price.”
Right-Wingers in Congress Won’t Win
Their Wacky Shutdown Fight
After McCarthy and Biden struck a
deal in May to keep funding nearly flat for the next fiscal year, the House
Speaker went back on the agreement, announcing that lawmakers would instead try
to pass funding at lower levels. The White House and Democrats blasted him for
the about-face, accusing him of toadying to the House’s ultraconservatives.
“I need to be very clear, it’s up
to the Speaker to twist in the wind. I mean, seriously... a deal is a deal,”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said aboard Air Force One on
Tuesday, TIME reported.
Meanwhile, over in the upper
chamber, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-KY) reached an agreement on a bipartisan plan to come to the
rescue on Tuesday afternoon, according to The New York Times.
The stopgap measure would keep the government open through Nov. 17, allowing
lawmakers a longer leash on which to negotiate thornier, longer-term spending
matters.
The bill is slated to face a test
vote late Tuesday afternoon, the Times reported. Senate
leadership hopes to pass it and send it to the House by the end of the week. But
with language on the bill providing “billions” in disaster relief and aid to
Ukraine—both Biden administration priorities—it is unknown whether McCarthy
will even introduce it to the floor, where it will undoubtedly face fierce
criticism by Gaetz and Co.
Details on the bill’s exact
language were unclear on Tuesday. Sources familiar with talks in the Senate
told the D.C. newspaper Roll Call that
leadership is “cognizant of the pressures McCarthy is facing and are trying to
give him something his conference can feasibly swallow.”
With McCarthy having put the
House’s stopgap bill on hold and turned to passing individual bills, the agenda
for the rest of Tuesday is expected to include voting on four spending bills. The
legislation—which dictates funding for the next year for the Departments of
Defense, Homeland Security, State, and Agriculture—imposes steep spending cuts
that the Senate is expected to reject outright.
Still, McCarthy seemed to see the
votes as a potential bellwether. “I feel we’ve made some progress,” he told
reporters, according to CBS News. “We’ll know
Tuesday night that we have.”
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ATTACHMENT
THIRTY FOUR – From Time
KEVIN MCCARTHY’S SHUTDOWN DILEMMA
BY NIK POPLI SEPTEMBER 26, 2023 4:17 PM EDT
With
just five days to go until the government shuts down without a spending deal, House
Speaker Kevin McCarthy is at a crossroads.
He can either shut down the government and possibly save his
standing with the GOP hardliners threatening to oust him, or work with
Democrats to pass a short-term spending bill and avert a government
shutdown—potentially at the expense of his own speakership.
Caught
in the middle of the California Republican's political calculus are millions of
Americans who would be impacted by even a short government shutdown, including
hundreds of thousands of federal workers and scores of everyday citizens.
The threat to McCarthy's leadership comes from Florida Rep. Matt
Gaetz and at least four other conservative hardliners who have said that they
would attempt to overthrow McCarthy if he cooperates with Democrats to pass a
stopgap measure to keep the government funded. These lawmakers are adamant in
their opposition to any funding bill that doesn't meet their strict fiscal and
policy demands.
McCarthy has been exploring
various strategies, including a proposal to package four individual
appropriations bills that would cut billions of dollars in spending. The
approach would mark an attempt to appease conservatives while buying more time
to pass the rest of their spending bills, though there is no guarantee that
McCarthy can gather enough support from his fellow Republicans to pass this
funding package or a continuing resolution (CR), a short-term bill.
Asked on Tuesday if he’s willing
to work with House or Senate Democrats to keep the government open, McCarthy
signaled that he would rather bypass talks with congressional Democrats and
instead strike a spending deal directly with President Joe Biden, months after
the pair agreed to funding levels during this year’s debt
ceiling fight. “I think it’d be very important to have a meeting with the
President,” McCarthy said. Any potential deal would have to include the House
GOP’s border security package, he added. “I believe we have a majority here,
and we can work together to solve this. It might take us a little longer, but
this is important,” McCarthy said.
The House Speaker's political
tightrope act is compounded by former President Donald Trump's backing of the
conservative hardliners. Last week, Gaetz made his stance clear, stating, "I’m
giving a eulogy to the CR right now. I’m not voting for a continuing
resolution, and a sufficient number of Republicans will never vote for a
continuing resolution."
But even if McCarthy decides to go
around the far-right members of his own party and work with Democrats, it’s not
clear how his colleagues across the aisle will react. If McCarthy attempts to
work with Democrats to avoid a shutdown, Republicans could trigger a
"motion to vacate," forcing a vote on whether to oust McCarthy as
Speaker. Democrats would then face a difficult decision: support McCarthy in
order to keep the government funded and risk angering their own party's base,
or seize the opportunity to potentially remove him from office.
Moderate Democrats have so far
refrained from making concrete promises. Some Democrats may even demand
concessions in exchange for their support of McCarthy. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a
Texas Democrat who sits on the Appropriations committee, tells TIME that he
would be willing to help McCarthy “for the good of the institution” by tabling
a motion to vacate, a proposal that he says several Democrats would support to
keep the government open. “I feel bad for him because he is the Speaker and is
supposed to be governing,” Cuellar says. “It’s unfortunate but he’s got to make
a decision. It’s like a Band-Aid: do you pull it slowly or do you just pull it
off and vacate?”
“Either we do it now or he’s going
to live and work the next year and a half under this threat,” he added. “And he
can’t operate under a constant threat by his far-right people.”
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are currently in
talks over a short-term bill to keep the government open past Sept. 30, though
any Senate plan may get bogged down in the Republican-led House if it includes
the $24 billion to help Ukraine that the White House requested—a move several conservatives oppose.
McCarthy also has the White House
to appease. White House officials have insisted that McCarthy uphold his end of
the debt ceiling deal he made with
Biden this summer, which kept government funding at nearly flat levels for the
next fiscal year. But conservatives had pushed for much lower funding levels,
with some viewing the agreement as a starting point for negotiations. "I
need to be very clear, it’s up to the Speaker to twist in the wind. I mean,
seriously ... a deal is a deal," White House spokesperson Karine
Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday. "The President
made a deal with the Speaker and a bipartisan deal that was voted by two-thirds
of House Republicans back in June."
Michael Linden, a former Office of
Management and Budget official who was closely involved in the negotiations
that led to the Biden-McCarthy debt ceiling deal, says it is “extremely
unusual” for the government to shut down not long after congressional leaders
reached a bipartisan agreement on overall spending levels. “My impression
absolutely was that they were negotiating in good faith and that they intended
to stick to the terms and the contours of the deal,” Linden says of past budget
talks between McCarthy and Biden. “Now I hope that Speaker McCarthy makes good
on his word. Allowing the government to shut down would not only be going back
on the deal, but it would be extremely damaging for him. Under what circumstances
would anybody in any future need for negotiation trust that he is able to make
good on his word if he can’t deliver this?”
On Tuesday, McCarthy projected
confidence that he’s flipped enough of the five Republican holdouts, but doubts
remain. Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who backed McCarthy’s
speakership bid, said on CNN on Sept. 24 that he won’t support a short-term
bill and that he would “look strongly at” overthrowing McCarthy if he passes
one relying on Democratic votes. Other conservatives, including Reps. Eli Crane
of Arizona and Dan Bishop of North Carolina, have expressed similar views,
underscoring McCarthy’s challenge.
“It really does suggest how
extreme and out of the mainstream this faction of House Republicans is, and it
puts Kevin McCarthy in a very difficult position,” Linden says.
McCarthy has so far struggled to
assemble enough votes to pass individual spending bills, in part because
conservatives want a slew of amendments in the legislation on hot-button policy
issues ranging from abortion and LGBTQ troops to racial identity and border
wall construction. The far-right demands, despite having support from some
prominent Republicans, risk turning off Democrats who GOP leaders will almost
certainly need to pass any spending bills.
House Republicans on Tuesday are
expected to bring up a procedural vote to move forward on four regular
appropriations bills this week, a significant test for McCarthy after he failed
to pass a similar procedural vote for a defense bill last week in a major
embarrassment for the House GOP leaders. Rep. Chip Roy, a hard-right Texas
Republican who worked on the short-term funding bill, told Fox News last week
that his party’s holdouts are “gonna eat a s—t sandwich” that they “probably
deserve to eat” if they continue to block a plan to keep the government open.
Politically, a split within ultra-conservative circles could be McCarthy’s best
hope of survival, allowing him to make the case to moderate Republicans and
Democrats that ousting him wouldn’t solve any problems, because the far-right
holdouts are too powerful for any Speaker to contend with.
“There may have never been a
shutdown where the blame for causing it has been so crystal clear,” Linden says.
“This is a problem that has been caused entirely within the Republican
[conference] in the House.”
ATTACHMENT
THIRTY FIVE – From CNN
TENSIONS ERUPT BETWEEN MCCARTHY AND GAETZ AT CLOSED-DOOR HOUSE GOP
MEETING AS SHUTDOWN NEARS
By Melanie Zanona, Clare
Foran, Lauren Fox and Haley Talbot, CNN Updated 4:02 PM EDT, Thu September 28, 2023
Tensions erupted as House
Republicans met behind closed-doors on Thursday, the latest sign of deep
divisions and infighting as the House GOP conference has failed to coalesce
around a plan to avert a shutdown.
GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz and Speaker
Kevin McCarthy got into a testy exchange during the meeting, according to a
source in the room. Gaetz stood up and confronted McCarthy about whether his
allies were paying conservative influencers to bash Gaetz in social media posts
– an allegation circulating on social media and one the speaker’s office has
denied.
McCarthy’s response, according to
the source in the room, was that he wouldn’t waste his time or money on Gaetz.
Another source said McCarthy also shot back that he doesn’t know what Gaetz is
spending time on, but he (the speaker) is donating $5 million to help keep the
majority.
“I asked him whether or not he was
paying those influencers to post negative things about me online,” Gaetz told
CNN’s Manu Raju – and confirmed that McCarthy said he wouldn’t waste time on
him.
McCarthy and Gaetz have long had a
tense relationship and Gaetz has led the charge in threatening to force a vote
to oust the speaker as pressure on McCarthy builds during the shutdown spending
fight and hardline conservatives balk at the prospect of passing any kind of
short-term funding extension to keep the government opening.
After the exchange, members in the
room could be heard complaining about Gaetz, with one member calling him a
“scumbag” and another saying “F**k off,” according to a third source in the
room.
McCarthy’s outside counsel earlier
this week sent a cease and desist letter to the person soliciting influencers
to bash Gaetz and claiming to be doing so on behalf of McCarthy, according to a
copy of the letter obtained by CNN.
With only three days to go before
government funding expires, House Republican divisions have been on full
display with the conference at odds over the path forward as Congress barrels toward a shutdown.
The Senate has put together a
bipartisan proposal to avert a shutdown and is working to advance it through
the chamber to final passage. But House Republicans have thrown cold water on
that plan, leaving the two chambers at an impasse.
Instead, McCarthy is gearing up to
have the chamber vote Friday on a GOP stopgap bill, but he appears to lack the
votes from his own members to pass the measure.
House
Republicans gear up for spending fight
House Republicans are planning
late night votes Thursday on a series of separate spending bills, though it’s
not clear if the measures have enough GOP support to pass and at least one is
expected to fail. Even if any of the bills pass, they would be dead on arrival
in the Senate.
Any failed bills could provoke
another chaotic scene on the House floor that would put the divisions within
the House GOP conference front and center, and hand another embarrassing defeat
to GOP leaders.
A number of House conservatives
oppose any kind of stopgap measure because they argue that Congress needs to
focus instead on enacting full-year appropriations bills.
House GOP leaders put full-year
funding bills on the floor hoping that if they can demonstrate progress on the
measures, it could help them make the case to conservative holdouts that they
are working to complete the regular appropriations process, but more time is
needed to finish the work.
On the other hand, if any of the
spending bills fail, GOP leadership may point to that to make the case to the
holdouts that a short-term funding extension is the only viable path forward.
House GOP leadership has now
decided to keep an Agriculture appropriations bill on the schedule for Thursday
evening, despite roughly 50 members indicating they will vote against the bill,
according to a Republican aide.
The bill is expected to fail
dramatically on the floor at this point, though – as always – the schedule is
flexible and could change.
And despite the fact that House
GOP leadership does not currently have the votes for their short-term spending
bill, the plan remains that the House will vote tomorrow on a measure, three
sources told CNN.
McCarthy has been saying all week
this was the plan but as the hardliners have dug in, it remained an open
question if he’d go through with it, risk a potentially embarrassing vote and
be seen as unable to pass a bill out of his chamber before a Saturday midnight
deadline.
Senate works
to advance bipartisan bill
Meanwhile, the Senate is working
to advance a bipartisan stopgap bill that would keep the government open
through November 17 and provide additional aid to Ukraine and disaster relief.
McCarthy has so far dismissed that bill.
It could take until Monday to pass
the Senate’s bill to keep the government open if GOP Sen. Rand Paul slows down
the process over his demand that the bill drop the $6.2 billion in aid to
Ukraine it contains, according to senators. That would put it past the Saturday
evening shutdown deadline.
GOP senators are trying to cut a
deal to give Paul an amendment vote in exchange to let the process speed up.
Any one senator can slow down the process, and it takes unanimous support to expedite
a vote in the chamber.
The Senate took a procedural vote
to advance the bipartisan stopgap bill on Thursday, though it’s still not clear
when a final passage vote will take place. The vote was 76 to 22.
A small group of Senate
negotiators are frantically working to find a series of amendments that could
boost border security and be added to the Senate’s short-term spending bill and
GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, a member of that group, said on Thursday that they are
making progress.
Tillis said negotiators are eyeing
separate amendments on more funding for border security and changes in border
policy. One would be an amendment that would increase funding and would require
just a simple majority of votes to pass. The other that deals with policy would
be at a higher 60 vote threshold.
“Time is of the essence,” Tillis
said when asked how long this would take.
Government
prepares to shut down
As the September 30 shutdown
deadline rapidly approaches, the federal government has begun preparing for its
effects.
A shutdown could have enormous impacts across
the country, in consequential areas ranging from air travel to clean drinking
water, as many government operations would come to a halt, while
services deemed “essential” would continue.
The nearly 4 million Americans who
are federal employees will feel the effect immediately. Essential workers will
remain on the job, but others will be furloughed until the shutdown is over.
None will be paid during the impasse. For many, a shutdown would strain their
finances, as it did during the record 35-day funding lapse in 2018-2019.
Democratic and Republicans alike
have been highlighting the potential impacts of a shutdown as they warn against
a lapse in funding.
“It’s important to remember that
if we shut down the government – for those of us who are concerned about the
border and want it to be improved – the border patrol … have to continue to
work for nothing,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said at a news
conference Wednesday.
US Border Patrol agents are considered essential and
will continue to perform their law enforcement functions, including
apprehending migrants crossing the border unlawfully, during a government
shutdown – but without pay.
The White House is sounding alarms
about massive disruptions to air travel as tens of thousands of air traffic
controllers and Transportation Security Administration personnel work without
pay. During the 2019 shutdown, hundreds of TSA officers called out from work –
many of them to find other ways to make money.
The White House has warned that a
shutdown could risk “significant delays for travelers” across the country.
The White House has also warned of
impacts to national security, including the 1.3 million active-duty troops who
would not get paid during a shutdown.
CNN’s Manu Raju, Kristin Wilson,
Morgan Rimmer, Betsy Klein and Tami Luhby contributed to this report.
@OTHER @BEGIN
ATTACHMENT
THIRTY SIX – From
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THIRTY SEVEN – From
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THIRTY EIGHT – From