The OTHER Democratic Demand for Reopening the Government
It’s about stopping Donald Trump and Russ Vought—and it can’t happen soon enough.
DONALD TRUMP AND HIS ALLIES are going scorched earth in the debate over how to end the government shutdown.
On Friday afternoon, budget director Russ Vought announced that he was ordering several thousand layoffs across the executive branch. Trump and Vought had for days threatened this sort of action—that is, firing workers rather than simply furloughing them, as had been customary in past shutdowns. They had held off, fueling hopes that maybe the threat was idle. Apparently, it was not.
Vought’s announcement came shortly after another significant escalation: House Speaker Mike Johnson telling reporters that he expected to enact more “rescissions” in the coming days. Rescission is the process of canceling funds that Congress has already appropriated—and something the Republican Congress did in July, over the strenuous objections of Democrats who said it broke the terms of bipartisan spending agreements they had previously reached.
With both the mass firings and Johnson’s statement, it seems plain that Republicans are trying to exert new leverage in the fight over the shutdown, which began after the government ran out of funding on September 30. Although Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress, they need some Democratic senators to vote with them to pass legislation to reopen the government.
Almost all Democrats have said they won’t give up their votes unless the Republicans meet several conditions. And one of those conditions has gotten very little attention, even though its purpose is to block precisely the sorts of actions that took place on Friday—and that have been going on for nine months now, as Trump has seized more and more power over federal spending.