{"id":166515,"date":"2025-10-02T06:47:23","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T06:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/this-is-their-shutdown-democrats-and-republicans-blame-each-other-as-government-closes-down-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T06:47:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T06:47:23","slug":"this-is-their-shutdown-democrats-and-republicans-blame-each-other-as-government-closes-down-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/this-is-their-shutdown-democrats-and-republicans-blame-each-other-as-government-closes-down-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018This is their shutdown\u2019: Democrats and Republicans blame each other as government closes down – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Democrats say Republicans have \u2018decimated healthcare for 20m Americans\u2019 and say they will not blink first
Democratic leaders vowed on Wednesday to take their message to the American people that the blame for the shutdown crisis lies solely with Donald Trump<\/a> and the Republicans<\/a> and their attacks on healthcare<\/a> provisions, as the US entered the first government shutdown<\/a> in almost seven years. Republicans squarely blamed their political opponents.
Chuck Schumer<\/a>, the Democratic minority leader in the US Senate<\/a>, said his party would fight on several fronts including \u201cTV stations, social media, in picketing, in protesting, every way\u201d to drive the party\u2019s point home. In an interview on MSNBC\u2019s Morning Joe on Wednesday, he said: \u201cWe\u2019re going to say, \u2018Go tell Trump he\u2019s the one doing it.\u2019 That\u2019s our plan.\u201d
As the blame game intensified on Capitol Hill, Schumer accused Republicans<\/a> of blatantly lying with their talking point that Democrats had shut down the government in order to extend healthcare benefits to undocumented immigrants. Noncitizens are barred from federal healthcare programs.
\u201cThat\u2019s an effing lie,\u201d Schumer said. \u201cThey are afraid of the truth \u2013 they know that what they have done has decimated healthcare for 20 million Americans.\u201d
Later on Wednesday morning, Republican congressional leaders gathered outside in Washington DC for a press conference to continue hammering home exactly that point.
The speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson<\/a>, said: \u201cDemocrats could have worked with us. Instead they prioritized taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens.\u201d
Johnson, a Louisiana congressman, said the situation had been \u201centirely avoidable\u201d and warned: \u201cThe longer this goes on the more pain will be inflicted, because it is inevitable when the government shuts down.\u201d
He accused the Democrats<\/a> of encouraging the shutdown to \u201csatisfy their far-left base\u201d.
The Senate majority leader, John Thune, signaled his goal was to wear Democrats down and pick them off one by one as he holds another vote on Wednesday morning on a bill that would fund the government mostly at current levels.
\u201cWe are one just one Senate rollcall vote away from ending the shutdown,\u201d Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said in a speech in the chamber. \u201cWe need a handful of Democrats to join Republicans to reopen the government.\u201d
Schumer, the senior senator for New York, remains in a tight spot as he stands in the middle of a tug-of-war between wings of his party. Three members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate broke ranks and voted with the Republicans.
From the other direction, progressive Democrats are pushing Schumer to stand resolute to reflect many voters\u2019 thirst for strong resistance to the extremes of the second Trump administration<\/a>. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive Democratic representative from New York, told MSNBC that holding the line over healthcare would act as a brake on all Trump\u2019s extremist ambitions.
\u201cWe have to stop enabling their abuse of power. When we\u2019re fighting on healthcare, it forces them to act in accordance with the law in other ways too \u2026 They want us to blink first, and we have too much to save,\u201d she said.
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Other prominent Democrats pressed the message that the buck stopped with the US president. Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in last November\u2019s presidential election, posted on X<\/a> 10 minutes after the shutdown began at midnight that \u201cPresident Trump and congressional Republicans just shut down the government because they refused to stop your health care costs from rising\u201d.
She added: \u201cLet me be clear: Republicans are in charge of the White House, House, and Senate. This is their shutdown.\u201d
Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, put out a video<\/a> at midnight in which he said the cause of the shutdown was because \u201cRepublicans refuse to work with us to deal with the healthcare crisis they have created\u201d.
Trade unions representing federal workers called for a rapid end to the shutdown, amid fears that the Trump administration would use the crisis as an opportunity to fire additional government employees. Trump has threatened to lay off \u201ca lot of people\u201d, adding: \u201cThey\u2019re gonna be Democrats.\u201d
An alliance of unions, including the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), is suing the administration in federal court in San Francisco over the threatened layoffs. \u201cOur message is clear: fund the government, fix the healthcare crisis and put working people first,\u201d the AFL-CIO said after the shutdown kicked in.
Markets reacted nervously. US stock markets slipped in premarket trading, with the S&P 500 down about half a percentage point.
Stock futures were also falling, and the dollar weakened early on Wednesday, indicating anxieties over the impact on the wider economy.<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Democrats say Republicans have \u2018decimated healthcare for 20m Americans\u2019 and say they will not blink firstDemocratic leaders vowed on Wednesday to take their message to the American people that the blame for the shutdown crisis lies solely with Donald Trump and the Republicans and their attacks on healthcare provisions, as the US entered the first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":166516,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}