Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday that Democrats would reject a government funding bill that Republicans wrote and passed through the House, leaving it uncertain whether Congress can avert a shutdown before Friday night’s deadline.
The House on Tuesday narrowly approved a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through the end of September.
“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input — any input — from congressional Democrats. Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR,” Schumer said on the floor, calling for a one-month funding bill that provides more time to negotiate a deal.
“Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11 CR that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass," he said. “I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday.”
Fuck yeah.
Frankly, I see very little functional difference between shutting the government down and letting the government continue to “function”, where “function” is here defined as “tear itself apart using its own goddamn funding and funnel even more of our tax money towards billionaires”.
It’s not even valid to compare this to previous bullshit funding showdowns that the GOP has instigated, because the choice at that time was shutting the government down, or allowing itself to continue to function (traditional definition) as intended. The situation is completely unrelated, save for the fact that there’s a showdown.
And, now that I mention it: Fuck you, news networks, for not making it crystal clear to the public that this is, in fact, a brand new situation, despite the fact that some of us have heard the words they’re saying in a similar order before.