“I think you’re having a shutdown because there are masked men in the streets; I think you’re having a shutdown because the FCC is using its powers to silence comedians; I think you’re having a shutdown because Donald Trump is weaponizing the workings of the federal government into something that is like what we see in Hungary; I think you’re having a shutdown because we are in fundamentally abnormal political circumstances and a shutdown is one of very few ways for Democrats to yell really loudly, ‘stop, this is some kind of emergency…we are going to try to throw ourselves in front of this truck’. Even if healthcare polls well…I think on some level, both your people and the public…know that this is not really about healthcare.”
“The Senate minority leader, both privately to his caucus Thursday and in a floor speech shortly after, said he would vote to advance a GOP-written stopgap to fund the government through September. He said Republicans’ spending bill is “very bad.” But he argued the “potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse” and would empower President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to further gut federal agencies.”
“It’s that time again. The last act of Congress funding the federal government expires on September 30. So, unless Congress passes new funding legislation by then, much of the government will shut down.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), egged on by the House Freedom Caucus and by former President Donald Trump, reportedly wants to use this deadline to force through legislation that would make it harder to register to vote in all 50 states.
Johnson plans to pair a bill funding the government for six months with a Republican bill called the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” or “SAVE Act,” that would require new voters to submit “documentary proof of United States citizenship,” such as a passport or a birth certificate, in order to register to vote.
As recently as Monday night, Johnson’s plan to tie government funding to passage of the SAVE Act seemed dead. At least five House Republicans oppose the spending bill, enough that Johnson would need to secure Democratic votes in order to pass it. But Trump, the GOP’s presidential nominee, demanded on Tuesday that congressional Republicans “SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD” with legislation funding the government unless it also includes something like the SAVE Act.
There is no evidence that noncitizens vote in US federal elections in any meaningful numbers, and states typically have safeguards in place to prevent them from doing so. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, for example, claims to have identified 1,634 “potential noncitizens” who attempted to register during a 15-year period. But these possible noncitizens were caught by election officials and were never registered. In 2020, nearly 5 million Georgians voted in the presidential election.
More broadly, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, “illegal registration and voting attempts by noncitizens are routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate state authorities, and there is no evidence that attempts at voting by noncitizens have been significant enough to impact any election’s outcome.”
While noncitizen voting — which is, of course, illegal — has never been proven to have affected an election, there is evidence that the SAVE Act could have an impact on elections. That much is clear from Arizona, which already has a SAVE Act-like regime. Data from Arizona suggests the state’s law has made it slightly harder for people of color, a group that skews Democratic, to vote. And at least one analysis of Arizona voter data suggests that the SAVE Act could suppress voter registration among another group that tends to vote for Democrats: college students. So the bill could make it slightly more difficult for Democrats to win elections.
That said, the SAVE Act law does have a vague provision allowing voters who “cannot provide” the required documentation to submit other evidence that they are a citizen, and it provides that state or local officials “shall make a determination as to whether the applicant has sufficiently established United States citizenship.”
It’s unclear what, exactly, that means.
Notably, the SAVE Act would take effect immediately if enacted by Congress, and it imposes significant new administrative burdens on state and local election offices. So, if the law did take effect in the two months before a presidential election, it could potentially throw that election into chaos.”
“Over this 25-year stretch, Congress has passed its final annual funding package* an average of 113 days into the corresponding fiscal year, around Jan. 21. And that number is trending upward: Over the last decade, the government operated under stopgap funding measures for an average of 134 days, or into mid-February. We only need to look back two years, to fiscal 2022, to find the last time CRs stretched into March, and back to fiscal 2017 for an even longer impasse, which wasn’t resolved until early May.
This means Congress may spend half of each year struggling to complete its most basic responsibility of funding the government, at the expense of other legislative priorities. And even though passing CRs staves off government shutdowns, operating under short-term funding has costly, wide-ranging impacts on federal operations. Funding uncertainty makes it difficult for agencies to plan and budget effectively, often forcing them to delay major projects — an issue of particular concern when it comes to military readiness.”
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“Strikingly, this year’s funding bill not only passed with fewer Republican than Democratic votes, but also with more than half of the Republican caucus voting against it (breaking the informal “Hastert rule” of House majority leadership). Johnson certainly isn’t the first embattled GOP speaker to struggle with a divided party, but this marks the first time in the 25 years we analyzed that any annual appropriations bill or package has passed without a majority of the majority’s support.”
“The Democratic-majority Senate and Republican-controlled House are far behind in carrying out their basic duty of funding the government for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, with lawmakers scrambling to keep the lights on to give them more time to pass a full-year bill.
Schumer and his House Republican counterpart, Mike Johnson, early this month agreed to a $1.59 trillion discretionary spending level for the year that ends on Sept. 30. But in a sign of how bitterly the Congress is divided, the two parties now disagree on that number, with Democrats saying the actual amount agreed to is $1.66 trillion.
The intense jockeying between House Republicans seeking deep spending cuts and Democrats comes amid a $34.4 trillion national debt that is rapidly escalating and has prompted worries in part because of the heavy interest payments now being borne by the Treasury Department.
This third stopgap funding bill, known as a “continuing resolution” or “CR,” would simply extend last fiscal year’s spending levels until two deadlines of March 1 and March 8 for completing action of spending for various government agencies.”
“We now have experience with school openings, both in the US and globally, and there is little data to support the idea that schools are a major site of transmission or a driver of community spread.
For example, New York City has had schools open in a hybrid model since early October and monitors Covid-19 in the district by testing a random sample of students and staff. As of November 12, results show that of more than 123,585 total tests conducted since October 9, only 228 were positive (0.19 percent) — 95 students and 133 staff. These results are still early in the year, and students are not back yet full-time, but with more than a month of data, and during a time when cases are rising in New York generally, Covid-19 is not tearing through New York City public schools.”
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“Quickly closing schools — where we have not seen a lot of transmission — while leaving higher-risk establishments open — where there is a lot of transmission — does not make sense. When faced with overwhelming case surge and crushing hospital demand, school closure could be necessary to prevent further Covid-19 surge, but only as one component of a larger plan to reduce mobility and control transmission.”
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“data has been emerging about the harms of ongoing school closures. Washington, DC’s public schools, which remain in a largely remote model despite having low local new case rates until recently, report substantial reductions in kindergarten students meeting or exceeding benchmarks for reading. And Chicago Public Schools, which also remain in a largely remote model, report a stunning 15,000-student decrease in enrollment this year. Unforeseen extended school closures lead to lower test scores, lower educational attainment, and decreased earning potential.
These gaps are not impacting all groups equally. The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) reports that districts with the highest rates of poverty are nearly twice as likely to be operating with remote learning as districts with the lowest rates. The higher a district’s share of white students, the more likely it is to offer in-person instruction — a pattern that generally holds across cities, towns, suburbs, and rural areas. A great racial and economic disparity is widening unnecessarily, one that will be sewn into the fabric of our society even beyond this generation if we do not rectify the problem now.”
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“If the blue states are for holding back, many red states are recklessly opening their schools and increasing the odds of exposing children and staff to Covid-19 in the midst of raging outbreaks.”