President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Republican leaders in the House and Senate had a simple message as Washington barrels toward a government shutdown: It's all the Democrats' fault.
The government runs out of money at midnight on Tuesday.
As it stands, the House of Representatives has not been in session since two Fridays ago when Republicans passed a continuing resolution along party lines before promptly leaving town in a deliberate effort to force the Senate to swallow the partisan bill — and avoid thorny questions over the bipartisan effort to force release of the Epstein Files.
"We have disagreements about tax policy, but you don't shut the government down," Vice President JD Vance told reporters after a meeting with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
The meeting came after Trump had initially canceled a meeting with Schumer and Jeffries, the latter of whom he'd never met until today.
The meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the two men Trump has taken to calling "Minority Radical Left Democrats" was closed to press in an effort to avoid a repeat of the disaster that occurred in late 2018 when Trump preemptively took credit for what would become the longest government shutdown in history after he blew up at Schumer and then-incoming House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But that didn't stop the White House from sending Vance out to the waiting press corps to play attack dog for the cameras by accusing the Democrats of wanting to shut down the government to fund health care for illegal immigrants — a line he and his GOP colleagues have been using for weeks now.
Vance's claim about health coverage for those without legal status is patently false, but it's not a stretch to say Democrats are hoping to use health care as leverage in this government funding fight.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden administration expanded subsidies for the health care marketplace under the Affordable Care Act. The Inflation Reduction Act extended those subsidies for two additional years. Those expanded subsidies expire at the end of the year.
But Republicans say that Democrats are being unreasonable and are just trying to appease their left-wing base.
"Senator Schumer is afraid will no longer be the Democratic leader," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told The Independent on Monday.
Read more here.
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