Heartless Democrats Just Stopped a Bill To Pay These Gov't Workers During the Shutdown.
When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected President Trump’s proposal to reopen the government made last weekend, he called it “one-sided and ineffective” — and he lambasted the president for the financial burden that furloughed and unpaid government workers were facing.
“It’s clear the President realizes that by closing the government and hurting so many American workers and their families, he has put himself and the country in an untenable position,” Schumer said, according to Fox News.
“Unfortunately, he keeps putting forward one-sided and ineffective remedies. There’s only one way out: open the government, Mr. President, and then Democrats and Republicans can have a civil discussion and come up with bipartisan solutions.”
Well, all right. Absent that, what about a plan to pay some of the essential workers that are going unpaid? That’s what Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana proposed with the Coast Guard, offering up a bill that would give the men and women who protect our shoreline — and who are under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security, which is currently shut down — their pay.
Schumer refused. Why? Because it didn’t open the whole government.
“President Trump is responsible not only for thousands of Coast Guard personnel not getting paid but hundreds of thousands of other federal employees also not getting paid,” the Senate minority leader said after asking Kennedy to modify his bill to also reopen the part of the government that remains closed, according to The Hill.
Kennedy refused, since that would obviously sink the bill at the White House level. So Schumer, ever so solicitous of the men and women in government who aren’t getting paid, refused to let some of the men and women in government who aren’t getting paid get paid.
“It will be a futile, useless exercise,” Kennedy said regarding Schumer’s proposal to modify the bill.
“Now, we can go through it if you want to. You can spend all day trying to teach a goat how to climb a tree, but you’re better off hiring a squirrel.”
“I would remind him whether it’s squirrel, jack rabbit or armadillo, that we are the number one branch of government, and we have veto override power,” Schumer said.
“We could get the powers paid even if he won’t sign it.”
It’s kind of amazing that the Democrats have decided Congress is the number one branch of government after Barack Obama spent the better part of his presidency ignoring it.
Back then, the pen and the phone of the president was all the rage. Now, given the fact that they have the House and filibuster power in the Senate, suddenly Congress is the number one branch of government. It would have been interesting to see this kind of attitude from Schumer circa DACA, but I digress.
Anyway, the vote on the tree-climbing goat wasn’t taken. Two votes did take place in the Senate, however, to reopen the government — one by the Republicans, one by the Democrats.
The Republican plan was basically what the president outlined in his speech last weekend: $5.7 billion for the wall with some movement on immigration issues. The Democrat plan would reopen government until Feb. 8 while both sides negotiated with zero money for the wall.
As you might have expected, both proposals fell well short of the 60 votes needed, which means the number one branch of government still didn’t get anyone in the government — Coast Guard members included — paid.
Last I checked, that’s what Schumer said he cared about. In fact, he basically said it was the height of heartlessness to partially close the government and leave families without paychecks. So then, what would one call it when someone deliberately refuses to pay our service members for political gain?
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