On Saturday, the House passed a stopgap funding resolution that keeps the government funded through November 17 without any new aid for the never-ending war in Ukraine, thus temporarily averting a shutdown. Democrats have been aggressively touting the passage of the bill as a victory for them and a defeat for “extreme MAGA Republicans.”
“We went from devastating cuts that would have impacted the health, safety, and economic wellbeing of the American people [to a] spending agreement that meets the needs of the American people across the board [and is] entirely consistent with what Democrats have said from the very beginning: The only path forward a bipartisan spending agreement that keeps government open avoids a catastrophic government shutdown,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said. “The American people have won. Extreme MAGA Republicans have lost.”
Is that really what happened, or are Democrats projecting? Make no mistake about it: Democrats want people to believe that it was a victory for them, and the media is certainly doing its part to push that narrative. But Democrats didn’t get what they really wanted: a shutdown.
It seems that Jefferies and other Democrat leaders want us to forget that they literally made multiple attempts to delay the vote on the stopgap resolution in the hopes of not meeting the deadline for funding the government, thereby forcing a shutdown.
“Democrats filed a motion to adjourn the House in an effort to get more time to review the GOP legislation and citing trust issues with their colleagues across the aisle,” the Washington Examiner reported Saturday. “While the effort failed, Democrats successfully stalled the vote for just under an hour as Democrats reviewed the resolution. During the motion to adjourn, which was voted against by both parties, Democrats voted one-by-one by hand in a bid to stall the vote on the stop-gap bill.”
Even Jeffries, who acted as though this was a victory for the Democrats, made a personal effort to stall the vote. When the motion to adjourn failed, Jeffries exploited a rule to allow the leader of a party to speak on the floor as long as he or she wants to. “Strap in; this could take a while,” Jeffries warned before he began talking.
Democrats claiming they wanted to review the stopgap resolution was also a laughable excuse. House members aren’t exactly known for reading bills before they are passed. In fact, history has shown that Democrats are all for passing a bill first in order to find out what’s in, as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said about Obamacare back in the day.
Then there was the ill-advised federal crime committed by Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who pulled a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building during the vote in yet another attempt to delay the process in the final hours before a shutdown would force many federal agencies to cease operations.
Democrats want a shutdown. History has shown that Democrats will blame every shutdown on the Republicans, and when a Democrat is in the Oval Office, that president will use their power to make the shutdown as painful as possible to maximize the political fallout. Clinton did it. Obama did it. You can bet that Joe Biden will do it, too, if he gets the opportunity.