Shutdown appears inevitable after Senate fails to pass funding plans
Office of Management and Budget orders federal agencies to launch shutdown plans From CNN's Kaanita Iyer Hours ahead of the midnight government shutdown deadline, the Office of Management and Budget is asking federal agencies to launch their shutdown plans, blaming Democrats for the upcoming lapse in funding.
“President Trump supports passage of H.R. 5371, but it is now clear that Democrats will prevent passage of this clean CR prior to 11:59pm tonight and force a government shutdown,” OMB Director Russell Vought’s letter to agency heads reads. “As such, affected agencies should now execute their plans for an orderly shutdown.”
The letter also asks federal employees to “report to work for their next regularly scheduled tour of duty to undertake orderly shutdown activities.”
Several agencies have announced their shutdown plans, which includes furloughing thousands of federal workers, while many others will have to continue working without pay.
Vought said earlier today that the government has the authority “to make permanent change to the bureaucracy,” such as cutting jobs and programs rather than just furloughing government workers.
Nothing that comes out of Maxine Waters' mouth should shock anyone at this point. Making her into a mouthpiece for the DNC is one of the shrewdest political moves I've seen out of the RNC/MAGA.
I would argue that 'blaming the Dems' when the other side has a stranglehold on every branch is equally head-scratching... but that's the playbook these days.
There is no level of sucking we haven't seen; in fact, I'm pretty sure we hold the patents on a few levels of sucking NOBODY had seen until the past few years.
So they are showing the country who they really are. They will shut down the government and stop real citizens from government aid because they want to give illegals healthcare. They simply do not acre about their own citizens!!!
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money." Margarat Thatcher
Based on recent reports, millions of Americans will face significant increases in their healthcare premiums in 2026 if enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans are allowed to expire. The claim that a Republican plan is causing this can be tied to the expiration of these subsidies under legislation passed by a Republican-led Congress, and the party's general opposition to extending them.
You want working people to have huge increases in their healthcare costs because Republicans are telling you to. People who make too much money for medicaid but who do not make enough money to buy private health insurance and their employers offer no healthcare.
Murica! Freedumb!
Intoducing for The Cleveland Browns, Quarterback Deshawn "The Predator" Watson. He will also be the one to choose your next head coach.
No they did not. They voted it down to protect over 20 million Americans on Obamacare from having huge increases in their healthcare premiums. Try to keep up for a change.
Intoducing for The Cleveland Browns, Quarterback Deshawn "The Predator" Watson. He will also be the one to choose your next head coach.
So no matter what's in a spending bill, no matter who it hurts, the only one's to blame are those who voted no?
Yes, they voted to shut down the government to protect illegals.
George Stephanopoulos humiliates Mike Johnson TO HIS FACE with brutal on-air fact check over his shutdown lies!
Contrary to what the GOP says, the government is shut down for one reason and one reason only — because Republicans won’t extend the healthcare subsidies keeping millions of Americans on their healthcare.
Stephanopoulos put the question directly to Johnson, asking him straight-up why he doesn’t want Americans to have health insurance: “The Democratic proposal is designed to prevent millions of Americans from losing their health insurance, losing Medicaid coverage, or paying higher health care premiums. Why are you against that?”
Johnson sputtered “that’s an absurd statement. Let's be clear about what happened last night, George” — but before he could get to his lies, Stephanopoulos informed him and everyone watching that “That’s a factual statement.”
The House Speaker rolled out the GOP’s Big Lie Of The Week, saying “The Democrats said instead that they wanted to give health care to illegal aliens instead of keeping critical services provided for the American citizens. That's what happened, plain and simple.”
But Stephanopoulos set the record straight. “Here are the facts. The proposal does NOT provide health care for illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants cannot buy health care under the Affordable Care Act. They cannot receive health care subsidies. Immigrants are ineligible for Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Program. The Democratic bill does not make them eligible.”
I find it a little nauseating that congress members continue to get paid during a shutdown but folks like janitors and park rangers don't.
AMEN
There is no level of sucking we haven't seen; in fact, I'm pretty sure we hold the patents on a few levels of sucking NOBODY had seen until the past few years.
So no matter what's in a spending bill, no matter who it hurts, the only one's to blame are those who voted no?
I think you need to think more about the people being hurt by a shutdown.
Holding up a spending bill just because you didn't get something through the legislative process is a bad look.
If you want to hold things up just so illegals get free health care, go for it.
Not to mention, without congress, President Trump is free to doge any "unnecessary" workers he wants.
Face it, the Dems can claim anything they want. They can post up bogus poll after poll but when people stop getting paychecks in a few weeks, if this lasts that long, the vast majority of those people are going to blame the no votes.
Backpay sounds great but it doesn't help if you have bills due today.
I don't care which side plays this game, but Congress shouldn't keep being paid in a shutdown, and I would be in favor if they didn't get any backpay as well. Do that and this silliness would stop.
I would be more in favor of a shutdown if the goal was to reduce spending, not increase spending.
Call me insensitive or anything you want, but I don't care a whole lot about the free healthcare for illegal aliens.
If everybody had like minds, we would never learn.
Holding up a spending bill just because you didn't get something through the legislative process is a bad look.
According to who? You think huge increases in 20 million Americans healthcare premiums is simply "didn't get something"?
There was no "legislative process". And that's the problem. Republicans wrote this up and said take it or leave it. That's an ultimatum not a process.
There is no "free healthcare for illegal aliens"...................................
GOP misleads with claim that Democrats shut down to give health care to 'illegal immigrants'
U.S. law prohibits federal health care benefits for undocumented immigrants. Democrats want to return benefits for those with lawful presence, like DACA recipients and asylum-seekers.
The sooner we quit with the pearl-clutching over political maneuverings that each party has done, the sooner we can get to the real root cause. You had it exactly right in one of your previous posts... it's ludicrous that the same politicians throwing the temper tantrums and holding everything up make up the few that continue to get paid into the shutdown.
There is no level of sucking we haven't seen; in fact, I'm pretty sure we hold the patents on a few levels of sucking NOBODY had seen until the past few years.
Hiltzik: The GOP says the Obamacare subsidies at the center of the shutdown are unimportant. Millions of Americans would disagree Michael Hiltzik Thu, October 2, 2025 at 6:00 AM EDT
1.3k Vice President JD Vance talks to reporters outside the West Wing of the White House, Monday, Sept. 29, 2025, in Washington, as House Speaker Mike Johnson of La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., listen. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) Vice President JD Vance, center, tries to blame Democrats for the government shutdown while speaking Monday at the White House, flanked by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), left, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, (R-S.D.) (Alex Brandon / Associated Press) More Republicans on Capitol Hill and at the White House have been working assiduously to belittle the concerns of Democrats about healthcare subsidies that are scheduled to expire at the end of this year and have become the central issue provoking the government shutdown that began Wednesday morning.
Democrats thus far have held fast to their demand that the subsidies be extended as a condition of their voting for the GOP's budget plan. But their position has been wildly misrepresented by the GOP.
The Democrats' demands would fund "free healthcare for illegals," Vice-President Vance said Monday, after a meeting of GOP and Democratic congressional leaders at the White House broke up without a compromise. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and others in his caucus have maintained that the "policy debate" about extending the subsidies should wait until December, while funding the government must take priority.
Premium tax credits for ACA marketplace coverage provide the greatest benefit for people who need the most help. The tax exclusion for employer health coverage does the opposite.
Gideon Lukens, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Both GOP assertions are wrong — so wrong that, given how thoroughly the truth about subsidies for "illegals" and the effect of delaying a decision has been aired in the press and in the government's own data, they rank not as mistakes or misrepresentations, but outright lies.
For one thing, Vance must know that undocumented immigrants aren't eligible for federally paid ACA health benefits. How do we know that's the case? It's stated by, among other government sources, the website for healthcare.gov, the federal ACA marketplace. I asked the White House to explain Vance's claim, but got no reply.
As for the timing of subsidy discussions, could Johnson be unaware that ACA insurers need to know what the subsidies will be in 2026 in order to estimate their costs and therefore set their premiums? Insurers have been screaming about this from the rooftops for months. I tried to reach Johnson's office to comment, but the office was closed due to the government shutdown.
The Republican position depends on a well-known phenomenon: Most Americans don't know much if anything about the subsidies, which reduce premium payouts for middle- and lower-income Americans in the Affordable Care Act (call it "Obamacare," if you prefer) marketplace.
Those who benefit from the subsidies — 13.4 million Americans, of whom two-thirds have household income up to $96,450 for a family of four — know, or will find out, that losing them will drive their healthcare costs up to or beyond affordability.
Sample 40-year-olds with income of $23,475, or 150% of the federal poverty level this year, would see their annual premiums increase from zero under existing subsidies to $920 a year without them, according to an estimate by Drew Altman of KFF. That's the rough equivalent of about one-fourth of their annual food budget and one-third of their spending on utilities and fuel.
Couples earning about 400% of the federal poverty level, or household income of $84,600, the annual premium for a benchmark Silver-tier ACA plan would rise to about $21,340, Altman estimates, up from $7,225 under current rules. The new figure would be more than double their food budget and more than four times their utility and fuel spending. For many such households, the increase would force them to choose between healthcare and food and utilities.
"This is how almost 24 million moderate-income working people will experience the loss of the enhanced tax credits — in the context of family budgets already straining to pay for food, utilities and housing," Altman wrote. "They don’t look at it the way we often do in health — 'it’s X dollars more.' They experience it as X dollars more on top of everything else. And right now, most everything else is also going up."
For those not in the ACA market, including recipients of Medicare and Medicaid and families receiving coverage via their employers, the subsidies are a black box. That makes them vulnerable to GOP misrepresentations.
Accordingly, it behooves me to provide this simple explainer. What's important is the bottom line: If the subsidies are allowed to expire, Obamacare premiums are likely to soar by at least 20%. Families that are currently paying nothing for their healthcare will be hit with premium bills reaching tens of thousands of dollars per person. As many as 5 million Americans are expected to lose or abandon their coverage due to its increased cost.
So let's start with the fundamentals.
When the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, it emerged with several well-known flaws resulting from partisan compromises. Perhaps the most important shortcoming was the structure of its premium subsidies, which were designed to make ACA plans affordable for middle- and low-income households.
Read more: Obamacare has been an economic boon, but some red states still don't get the message
The original ACA subsidies capped premiums on a sliding scale ranging from 2.07% of income for those earning 138% of the federal poverty line to 9.83% of income for those at 400% of the poverty line. This year, 138% of the poverty level for a family of four is $44,367 and 400% is $128,600.
The ACA's architects knew these subsidies were inadequate. Especially troubling was the sharp cutoff of any subsidies for families earning even a dime more than 400% of the poverty level. This became known as the "subsidy cliff." But it was an artifact of budget politics; the expectation was that Congress would get around to fixing the cheeseparing subsidy schedule at a later date.
Nothing happened until the pandemic. In the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, Congress refashioned the subsidies so that families with income up to 150% of the poverty level ($56,475 for a family of four this year) could find decent Obamacare plans for free. For those above that level and up to 400%, the subsidies were significantly increased, though the change was set to expire as of this Dec. 31.
premium credits The pandemic-era enhancements to Obamacare's premium tax credits, or subidies, nearly doubled enrollments within three years. (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) The act eliminated the subsidy cliff by limiting the premiums for families at 400% or above to 8.5% of applicable income. More importantly, they turbo-charged ACA health plan enrollments, which roughly doubled to 19.3 million from 9.7 million in the three years after the subsidies were increased. Unless you think that more Americans getting health coverage is a bad thing, this makes the case for extending the subsidies past Dec. 31.
Republicans and conservatives have misrepresented the pandemic-era change as a handout to millionaires. Perhaps the quintessentially mendacious treatment of the subsidy issue came from Dean Clancy of Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-funded right-wing think tank. In a screed published in the Hill on Sept. 18 advocating the subsidies' expiration, Clancy attacked what he labeled "Biden's health insurance handouts" as benefiting "even millionaires."
Basic math exposes that claim as balderdash. Someone earning $1 million a year would have to pay no more than $85,000 per person for an ACA plan.
Is this a handout? ACA expert Charles Gaba tested the claim by hunting for a benchmark Silver ACA plan, on which the subsidies are based, costing that much anywhere in the U.S. The highest-cost plans he found anywhere are in four counties of West Virginia, where a Silver plan for a 64-year-old couple tops out at $63,100 a year — in a state with the highest ACA premiums in the nation.
Via AfP, I offered Clancy an opportunity to respond to analyses of his article by Gaba and others, but got no answer.
What the conservative hand-wringing over the Obamacare subsidies overlooks is how they compare to the subsidies enjoyed by the majority of American households that get their health coverage through their employers. Their premiums are exempt from federal income tax and payroll tax. The cost of those exclusions comes to about $200 billion a year, according to a Treasury report in December. The ACA subsidies cost only $121.3 billion annually.
More to the point, the employer-coverage subsidies are heavily skewed toward more affluent households. Only 11% of employee-coverage households with income of $64,300 or less (that's 200% of the poverty level for a family of four) receive them, but nearly one-third earn more than 700% of the poverty level ($225,000 for a family of four). By contrast, two-thirds of the families receiving ACA subsidies earn less than 300% of the poverty level ($96,450 for a family of four) and only 8% earn more than 700% of the poverty level.
"Premium tax credits for ACA marketplace coverage provide the greatest benefit for people who need the most help," observed Gideon Lukens of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in December. "The tax exclusion for employer health coverage does the opposite....The improvements to premium tax credits made them much more progressive."
Under the circumstances, the GOP's insistence that the healthcare subsidies be taken out of the current budget debate and deferred to the end of the year looks like a cynical ploy. There's no guarantee, obviously, that the Republicans will be more willing to accept an extension months from now, when they've put the budget conflict behind them. Their ploy is to deprive Democrats of leverage. And why should Democrats give that up?
Let's make no mistake about the broader context: The GOP has had its knives out for the Affordable Care Act since its enactment. In the intervening 15 years, the law has only become more popular, but that hasn't kept the Republicans from looking for more ways to sap its value for the millions of Americans who depend on it. The attack on subsidies is a stalking horse for their long-term project of killing Obamacare. This is not the time to let them do it.
As one of the co-authors and chief architects of Project 2025, Russell Vought helped shape its proposals to drastically shrink the federal government and expand presidential power. He is now implementing these policies as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the second Trump administration..............................
Trump, Vought to decide which "Democrat Agencies" to cut during shutdown "opportunity"
President Trump said Thursday he will meet with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, "of PROJECT 2025 Fame," to discuss agency cuts on day two of the government shutdown.
The big picture: The White House, already waging a precedent-shattering messaging war, is seeking to make the shutdown as politically painful as possible for Democrats, threatening mass firings that labor unions say are unlawful and turn federal workers into pawns.
Trump is signaling the administration will begin to lay off "a lot" of federal workers, despite a union lawsuit arguing such actions are "contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious."
Driving the news: Trump said in a Truth Social post he and Vought will decide "which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent."
He added, he "can't believe the Radical Left Democrats" gave him the "unprecedented opportunity" to do so.
Yes, but: The president doesn't have the authority to unilaterally eliminate agencies created by Congress.
The intrigue: In his post, Trump referenced Vought's ties to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint to reshape life for millions of Americans and expand executive power.
Trump repeatedly distanced himself from the plan, which became a centerpiece of Democrats' 2024 opposition.
But on Wednesday, he recognized his OMB director's long-reported ties to the playbook as a key co-author.
Catch up quick: Ahead of the shutdown, Vought instructed agencies to prepare "Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees" in programs that are "not consistent with the president's priorities."
Democrats largely downplayed the threat, but it seems the White House is barreling forward with its drive to further hollow out agencies already pummeled by DOGE cuts. The shutdown could see approximately 750,000 federal employees furloughed each day.
The labor unions who sued the administration argued that "carrying out RIFs is plainly not a permitted (or 'excepted') function that can lawfully continue during a shutdown."
Yes, they said he was just trying to pwn the dems and not serious about almost everything he has done so far. The first president to act like a king and rule via social media. Murica! Freedumb!
Intoducing for The Cleveland Browns, Quarterback Deshawn "The Predator" Watson. He will also be the one to choose your next head coach.
Anybody who thinks dems caused this is delusional. Dems are fighting to keep people’s insurance via ACA (Obamacare) renewal and reversing any cuts to medicaid that they can. So cynical… Trump is a straight trash negotiator… maga republicans think they can bully there way to a new America. Idots.
There is no level of sucking we haven't seen; in fact, I'm pretty sure we hold the patents on a few levels of sucking NOBODY had seen until the past few years.
There is another issue that the Dems are pounding pretty hard to have incorporated into any spending bill and that is to have trump stop using rescission bills to remove money that was already approved in congress in bills that were approved into law.
That is a over reach of executive to remove the funding that you don't like-There are a number of examples already including US Aid and public broadcasting
It's especially hilarious when not very long ago trump claimed he had never heard of Project 2025.
I would think that repubs in close races would start getting cold feet as some of the policies start clobbering the poor as elections approach-bot vought and peter thiel and some others behind project 2025 don't really give 2 craps about backlash-what they want is very clear if anyone spent the time to purview project 2025
I believe that would depend a lot on what area of the country they are running in. As in Nashville is a liberal city but the surrounding suburbs are more conservative. The Republicans split the districts in the area to where Nashville is now split between three GOP districts. Nashville voters no longer hold any power outside of the city itself.
When watching local political commercials it seems the GOP candidates here argue about who is the Trumpiest. The most MAGA. "I'm more MAGA than he is! I'm the most MAGA of the MAGA's in the world of MAGA!"
But their constituents by and large aren't poor and aren't really being hurt by the things trump has done.
Intoducing for The Cleveland Browns, Quarterback Deshawn "The Predator" Watson. He will also be the one to choose your next head coach.
President Donald Trump said he would not sign legislation that calls for cuts to Social Security or federal health coverage for older and low-income Americans.
“If it cuts it, I would not approve,” the president said in an interview with TIME magazine published Friday, where he was repeatedly asked about cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security.
Asked about broader spending cuts … Trump said we’ll “love and cherish” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the last of which insures more than 70 million Americans. “We’re not going to do anything with that, unless we can find some abuse or waste,” Trump said. “The people won’t be affected. It will only be more effective and better.”
– Politico January 31, 2025
“We’re not going to touch it. Now, we are going to look for fraud,” Trump said Wednesday when asked about Medicaid.
Looks like early polling isn't quite going the way the repubs thought and senate repubs are talking to dems about a 2 year subsidy extension with reform.
You know what? If Trump starts firing govt workers I’m hoping a bunch of maga trump supporters get caught up and get the axe as well and start crying like the babies they are.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Thomas Jefferson.
The truth about the shutdown and health care for immigrants Analysis by Aaron Blake 6 hr ago
Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson during a news conference in Statuary Hall at the US Capitol on Friday. Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg/Getty Images The shutdown messaging war is in full effect, and early indications are that Republicans have been put in something of a bind, given the Democrats’ demand to extend enhanced Obamacare subsidies appears quite popular.
So Republican leaders have returned to a very familiar strategy – making false generalizations and misleading claims about undocumented immigrants, in an attempt to center the debate on more favorable terrain.
They’ve argued over and over again that Democrats are trying to provide health care to undocumented immigrants.
In fact, as CNN’s Tami Luhby has fact-checked, the changes Democrats are seeking on Obamacare and Medicaid would not directly provide coverage to undocumented immigrants, since they aren’t and still wouldn’t be eligible for either program.
That’s not to say there aren’t kernels of truth behind their claims, and the issue is complicated. Medicaid dollars do, in some situations, end up paying health care costs for those in the country without documentation as a matter of longstanding federal law. But the GOP’s political strategy to cast Democrats as holding government funding hostage over the issue rests on a rather Machiavellian and factually challenged effort to demonize migrants.
Let’s break it down.
After Republicans spent days largely just making this claim without detailing it, Vice President JD Vance stepped forward at Wednesday’s White House press briefing to at least put some meat on the bone.
His case boiled down to two things.
His first point was that the asylum-seekers and others with temporary legal status who would be eligible for these programs under the Democrats’ shutdown-ending proposal should nonetheless be treated as “illegal aliens.” He said this was because the Biden administration granted such designations too freely.
House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has also been vehement about this claim.
“Joe Biden used executive orders, and he expanded benefits, health care to illegal aliens in his four-year term,” Johnson said Thursday. “That was an outrageous violation of the existing federal law and of the principles of good stewardship.”
It’s an argument that could seemingly have plenty of appeal. Americans turned very sour on the Biden administration’s handling of immigration and asylum in recent years, before Biden moved to toughen up his approach. A Reuters-Ipsos earlier this year showed 56% of Americans wanted to “dramatically reduce” the number of migrants allowed to claim asylum at the border.
But saying these migrants should be considered “illegal” – even if Republicans genuinely believe that – doesn’t make them so, at least under current law.
To the extent Republicans want to treat them as illegal, they could take other steps to try to strip them of legal status. Unless and until they do, though, these people have legal status under US law and aren’t “illegal aliens.”
Vance’s second point was that there is at least one way in which federal dollars can be used to pay for the health care of immigrants who are actually undocumented – i.e. not just classes of people who he would prefer to treat as such.
A federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) mandates that any hospital that receives Medicare funds must treat anyone requiring emergency treatment, regardless of ability to pay, insurance or legal status. And the federal government reimburses hospitals for this treatment.
Vance painted undocumented immigrants in emergency rooms as a scourge, connecting it to longer waiting times because “very often, somebody who’s there in the emergency room waiting is an illegal alien.”
But in fact, new data shows federal reimbursements for emergency care for undocumented migrants is a minuscule portion of emergency Medicaid spending – only about 0.4% in Fiscal Year 2023, according to KFF.
And beyond that, it’s worth noting that this is not just a matter of federal law, but a federal law signed by a Republican president, Ronald Reagan. Republicans in their agenda bill earlier this year sought to reduce federal Emergency Medicaid funding; their argument is essentially that the move reduced a possible incentive hospitals might have to prioritize care for undocumented immigrants. But Democrats point out that just shifts costs to states and hospitals themselves, given they are still legally required to provide the care. That’s unless and until EMTALA is repealed.
That also raises some perhaps uncomfortable questions for the administration.
For one, the next logical question is whether Vance and Republicans would prefer that hospitals not provide potentially life-saving care to undocumented migrants who are severely ill, perhaps just allowing them to die.
An answer Thursday from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt showed how difficult these questions become. She was asked if hospitals should ask for proof of citizenship before treating a dying patient, and she responded, “That’s probably not a question for me to answer.”
And secondly, it reinforces that even Trump’s agenda bill still allowed for federal money to flow to giving undocumented migrants emergency health care. It was just a more restricted amount that shifted the burden to states and hospitals.
Republicans have also increasingly argued that some blue states are moving money around in such a way that they’re effectively using federal Medicaid funds under the guise of state funding for undocumented health care. Leavitt on Friday accused California of “a gimmick that funds its Medicaid for illegals program.”
But as Luhby noted, a provision that would have penalized states that purportedly do this was stripped from Trump’s agenda bill. The law does eliminate states’ ability to get a certain waiver related to the taxes that states can charge certain providers to help pay for Medicaid, but the provision isn’t specifically about undocumented immigrants.
As these claims have been fact-checked, Republicans have increasingly turned to another, separate argument.
They’ve noted that, during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, most of the top candidates supported covering undocumented immigrants with government health care. Vance, Leavitt and many other Republicans have pointed to a clip from a debate, in which the candidates all raised their hands in support of such a policy.
And this is true. It’s one of a number of positions Democrats staked out during that campaign to appeal to the political left that they probably wish they hadn’t. (Many such answers came back to bite Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential campaign.)
“Don’t let the Democrats lie to you,” Republicans Rep. Pete Stauber of Minnesota said Thursday on X. “In a 2019 debate, every Democrat candidate raised their hand in support of taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants. Now, they have shut down the government over it.”
Johnson added Thursday: “Those hands included Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Now, what did they do? Did they follow through on that promise? Yeah, they absolutely did.”
He clarified that he meant Biden expanded those who were eligible for such coverage by allowing them to obtain at least temporary legal status. So again, the argument seems to be more that these people shouldn’t have been given legal status rather than that they are currently undocumented in a legal sense.
And just because those Democrats expressed that view back then doesn’t mean it has any impact on the current debate. Republicans would argue that this betrays Democrats’ long-term intentions. But it’s not what Democrats are currently asking for out of a shutdown deal; they are primarily pushing for more generous federal subsidies to help Americans afford Obamacare policies. (And indeed, it seems highly unlikely that Democrats would view any move to shut down the government over undocumented immigrants’ health care as smart or practical politics today.)
Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona has even said Democrats would support language making doubly sure that any coverage wouldn’t be extended to the undocumented.
“We are willing to pass anything in law that says people in this country illegally should not be receiving any benefits, subsidies, anything,” Gallego told Semafor.
It’s not uncommon for politicians to try to spin debates in terms that are more favorable to their side. To a certain degree, it’s politics as usual.
But what we’ve increasingly seen in the Trump-era GOP is a more shameless and almost unflinching willingness to say whatever is most advantageous in the moment, no matter if it misleads Americans about the very real issues in an important debate.
The party has increasingly warmed to the tactics of a president who not only uttered more than 30,000 false and misleading claims in his first term, according to the Washington Post, but actually got significantly more counterfactual as time went on.
Perhaps the epitome of this approach came in 2024. The Trump campaign not only spread unfounded claims about Haitian migrants in Ohio eating people’s pets that even local Republicans rejected; Vance effectively acknowledged willingly spreading misinformation – while arguing that the ends justified the means.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash, “then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana. Because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”
You could understand why Republicans feel the need to adjust the terms of the debate here, given the enhanced Obamacare subsidy extensions Democrats are pushing for are overwhelmingly popular.
A KFF poll released Friday showed 78% of Americans and even 57% of MAGA Republicans supported extending them. A Washington Post poll released a day earlier showed 47% of Americans believed Trump and the Republicans were “mainly responsible” for the shutdown, compared to 30% who blamed Democrats. That’s somewhat counterintuitive, given Democrats are the ones who won’t sign on to a clean bill to keep the government open.
But it doesn’t change the fact that Americans aren’t getting a complete and accurate picture of the stakes.
A very Typical Trump/Maga trick.... to get to the truth it means paying attention to details. Something a lot of people are too lazy or stupid to do. People would prefer and gravitate to splashy sound bites ... "$50 million for condoms for Hamas" - "DOGE will save $2 Trillion" - "Democrats want free healthcare for illegals".
The more things change the more they stay the same.
A very Typical Trump/Maga trick.... to get to the truth it means paying attention to details. Something a lot of people are too lazy or stupid to do. People would prefer and gravitate to splashy sound bites ... "$50 million for condoms for Hamas" - "DOGE will save $2 Trillion" - "Democrats want free healthcare for illegals".
"War will be over in 24 hours" , "Biden let it 21 million criminals", "They were eating dogs" , .......
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