Subject: Shutdown
The Senate adjourned today without agreeing to the continuing resolution the House passed to fund the government until November 21. The Republicans refused to include the Democrats in any of their negotiations, and the Democrats, whose votes the Senate needed to pass the measure, said they would not agree to a continuing resolution unless it included a fix to extend the premium tax credits that support healthcare insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. While Republicans extended the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, they let the premium tax credits run out at the end of this year. Without that support, healthcare insurance premiums will skyrocket.

“We are shutting down,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said tonight, “because Donald Trump thinks he’s a king. This was totally avoidable, but Donald Trump told Republicans, ‘Don’t negotiate with Democrats.’... We didn’t shut down when Joe Biden was president. Why? Because Democrats, when they were in the majority, took their responsibility to govern seriously, reached out across the aisle, and built bipartisan funding agreements with the Republicans…. We aren’t asking for the moon. We are simply saying, we don’t want health insurance premiums to go up by 75% on the American public. That’s what Republicans have engineered as a means to pay for their giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. We aren’t asking for some big new healthcare program. We’re simply saying, if we’re gonna vote for a budget, we want that budget to not increase premiums on families across this country by 75%, bankrupting American families. You know what else we want? We want this president to start acting… lawfully.”


Heather Cox Richardson