Democrats pledge to work through Christmas on funding to rebuff Trump’s demands
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Friday she’s ready to stay in Washington “through Christmas” to fight off President-elect Trump’s demand to strip negotiated provisions out of a bill to fund the government into 2025.
Murray, the most senior ranking Senate Democrat, slammed billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, one of Trump’s top advisers, for torching the 1,547-page bill that congressional leaders unveiled earlier in the week. A second, Trump-backed plan, failed on the House floor Thursday night 174-235.
“I’m ready to stay here through Christmas because we’re not going to let Elon Musk run the government. Put simply, we should not let an unelected billionaire rip away research for pediatric cancer so he can get a tax cut, or tear down policies that help America outcompete China because it could hurt his bottom line,” Murray said.
“We had a bipartisan deal — we should stick to it,” she said, arguing the deal Democrats negotiated with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would “responsibly fund the government, offer badly needed disaster relief to communities across America, and deliver some good bipartisan policy reforms.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) urged Johnson to return to the bigger continuing resolution he signed off on earlier this week, before Trump and Musk torpedoed the bill.
“It’s a good thing the bill failed in the House. And now it’s time to go back to the bipartisan agreement, we came to,” he said Thursday night after Johnson failed to pass a plan-B stopgap.
Schumer warned Friday morning that Congress is on the precipice of a shutdown and pointed to the earlier deal on a continuing resolution as the best option to salvage the situation.
“If Republicans do not work with Democrats in a bipartisan way very soon, the government will shut down at midnight. It’s time to go back to the original agreement we had just a few days ago,” he said on the Senate floor.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle think it’s increasingly likely that Congress could be back in session the week of Christmas to pull the government out of a shutdown.
“Right now it looks like there’s a very good chance we may be in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. We could be in D.C. on Christmas Day,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on his podcast “The Verdict.”
“At this point, the path ahead appears very uncertain,” he said.