Government barrels toward shutdown as the blame game heats up Scott WongSeptember 30, 2025 at 10:07 PM 0 The Capitol building in Washington on Tuesday.
- - Government barrels toward shutdown as the blame game heats up
Scott WongSeptember 30, 2025 at 10:07 PM
0
The Capitol building in Washington on Tuesday. (Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The federal government is barreling toward a shutdown tonight, with President Donald Trump and Democratic leaders engaged in a fierce blame game and trading insults about each other online.
After his meeting on Monday with the Democrats, Trump shared a crude post on Truth Social that showed Senate Minority Leader Schumer, D-N.Y., with fake AI-generated audio, saying Democrats "have no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bulls---" and that if they give undocumented immigrants health care, they would vote for his party.
The post depicted Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also of New York, wearing a sombrero and a mustache as he stood silently by Schumer's side. Mariachi music played in the background.
The video referenced a Trump talking point that Democrats are demanding health care for undocumented immigrants in exchange for their votes to keep the government open. Democrats have called that a lie. They have pushed to extend expiring Obamacare subsidies and to undo Trump's Medicaid cuts, not to pay for health care for people who are in the country illegally.
Schumer responded to the video on X, writing: "If you think your shutdown is a joke, it just proves what we all know: You can't negotiate. You can only throw tantrums."
Responding on MSNBC, Jeffries called Trump's post a "disgusting video," adding that "bigotry will get you nowhere."
The House leader also took to X and shared a photo of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender. "This is real," Jeffries wrote above the photo, which was taken at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in 1997. (Trump has said he and Epstein had a falling out, and he was unaware of the financier's crimes).
The personal insults at this late stage suggest the two sides are nowhere close to an agreement to keep the government's lights on past Tuesday's deadline. The government is set to shut down at 12:01 a.m. unless the two sides can reach a short-term stopgap funding deal.
"It looks to me like we're headed for a shutdown," said Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. "And you know me, I'm the most optimistic person you know."
Federal agencies, including the Defense and State departments, have already posted their plans for how they will operate in the event of a shutdown.
The impacts of a shutdown would be felt by many. In that scenario, none of the millions of federal workers would be paid, and hundreds of thousands of them would be furloughed. In recent days, White House officials had tried to allow military personnel to continue receiving pay during a shutdown, according to a source familiar with the discussions, but those efforts were unsuccessful. So servicemembers wouldn't be paid during a shutdown, either.
And the White House has threatened to fire federal workers in a shutdown as well. Asked Tuesday morning how many government employees his administration would lay off, Trump responded: "Well, we may do a lot, and that's only because of the Democrats."
Later Tuesday, just hours before the shutdown deadline, the GOP-controlled Senate will hold another vote on the stopgap funding bill that passed the House earlier this month. That bill would keep the government funded for seven weeks and is intended to buy bipartisan appropriators more time to pass their year-long spending bills. The bill cleared the House on a party-line 217-212 vote but failed to secure the 60 votes needed to break a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
The Senate rejected it in a 44-48 vote more than a week ago.
Republicans have said Democrats can avert a shutdown by simply voting for the House-passed continuing resolution or CR, which would fund the government at current levels through Nov. 21. Senate Majority John Thune, R-S.D., is holding a second vote on the same bill Tuesday to underscore that Democrats are to blame.
But Democrats said they are trying to stave off a looming health care "crisis." Specifically, Democrats want any CR to include an extension of Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. They have also pushed for rolling back some of the cuts and changes to Medicaid that were enacted in Trump's so-called "big, beautiful bill" earlier this year.
Speaking to reporters in the Capitol after Monday's meeting with Trump, Schumer said Trump appeared to be "not aware" of the impacts of expiring Obamacare subsidies on everyday Americans. And he urged Trump to try to convince GOP leaders on Capitol Hill to back a deal to extend those subsidies.
"It's now in the president's hands," Schumer said, with Jeffries at his side. "He can avoid a shutdown if he gets the Republican leaders to go along with what we want."
Source: "AOL General News"
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