'#TrumpShutdown' Starts With Sarah Sanders' Attack on Senate Democrats
- mountroyaltimes
- Jan 20, 2018
- 3 min read
PHOTO: Not owned by the MRT.
At 12:00 P.M. ET, the United States of America's federal government entered shutdown mode amid the Senate's failure to pass yet another one of a series/streak of 'continuing resolution' (CR) short-term government funding bills.
Democrats are demanding that DACA be included and attached to the bill; a request that Republicans are intensely trying to rebuke and refute. All the meanwhile, the GOP is trying to attach the US-Mexico border wall, increased border security measures, and quite a lot more in return for CHIP, a child insurance program that Democrats back.
Although the Senate Democrats are being blamed by the other side of the aisle, it's important to remember that this is the first time in American history that a government shuts down while the party leading the presidency also has control over the House of Representatives and the Senate. Why are Dems to blame, then?
To pass a budget bill, you need a simple majority in the House. That's why it passed very quickly on January 18th, 2017 when the House passed it with well enough over 218 votes necessary. The CR then moved into the Senates' hands, where it had a rather risky future from the start amid clashes between Dems, the GOP, and Trump.
In the Senate, a budget bill needs 60 Senate votes to pass. The Republicans hold a majority of the Senate with 51 seats, compared to the Dems' 49 seats. That means that even if all Republicans voted to keep the government open, they'd still need to borrow at least 9 Democratic votes to pass the continuing resolution.
According to prior reports of meetings between major government officials of which seemed to all be desperately trying to avoid a government shutdown; it seemed as though Democrats had offered numerous deals that had been refused by Trump.
After the Senate vote results had been declared, nearly three hours after the vote had commenced on the Senate floor, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer lead a speech of which criticized President Trump's response to the threat of the government shutdown, hinting that he should be the only one to blame for it. Schumer said that, early in the morning when meeting Trump, he had even promoted the idea of DACA in exchange for the border wall Trump has claimed he wanted. It wasn't enough.
"What will be enough, then?" Schumer asked the Senate floor during his speech. He had just been criticized by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell who had stated that Dems were shutting down the government for something 'ridiculous', saying they had the obligation to 'act like adults and serve the American people'.
All the meanwhile, Trump's response to the government shutdown was empty and just... not there. The first communication following the passed deadline was from the office of the Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders of which slammed the Democrats and blamed them for the shutdown entirely as the official White House's position. She called the bill the 'Schumer Bill', highly contested via Twitter.
Worldwide, and even in Chuck Schumer's speech on the Senate floor, the consistency hearing of the #TrumpShutdown continues to vividly show up on trending lists via Twitter, Google, Facebook, and many others. The hashtag made it No.1 on Twitter's world trending list.
Note: This story is still being developed as the shutdown continues.
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