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It says: The altered email messages included language saying: "Thank you for contacting me. On September 10, 2025, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations. Due to the lapse of appropriations, I am currently in furlough status. I will respond to emails once government functions resume."
I don't like that it includes "I" and "me" because it looks like someone is putting words in the employee's mouth. I wouldn't consider that factual.
It could still be factual and read "Senate Republicans have blocked voting on S 2882" instead, or more extreme "Registered Republicans have lower education rates than democrats". Just because something is factual does not mean it is not a political statement, and one that would not have been made by the employee whose communication was changed. Let's all not play dumb here.
It's not factual, though, because it's telling (at best) a half-truth aimed at demonizing one political position. It's pure political messaging.
Come on. The message is overtly political (blaming democrats for the shutdown when republicans control the presidency + the house + the senate) and 100% of the people pretending it’s not would be outraged if the same thing was posted under a different administration.
We went from having government shutdowns all the time due to the rampant spending to just covering up the fact that he's blowing through more money than presidents do in 8 years. It leads to a perception that he's actually fiscally responsible.
The standoff is about a component of the Affordable Care Act that is expiring. Democrats don't have the footing to win this battle - so the longer the standoff holds the worse outcome they can expect. Trump's administration seems to have wanted this shutdown... and Democrats walked right into the landmine.
The bill already passed the House. The Democrats have a minorotiy in the Senate. 60 votes are required to pass the bill - and Democrats are holding it up, deliberately for political reasons.
It's entirely factual.
edit: This is what they would need to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option
I think shutdowns are usually pretty stupid, but I’m not reading for “nuclear option” to be the way this one gets resolved.
Congress cannot pass anything meaningful except one omnibus spending bill each year via budget reconciliation, which has arcane rules around flat budget impact after 10 years. Since congress can't do anything, we naturally move more and more of the details of federal governance to executive agencies and executive orders. While not all of this is bad, it has a few horrible effects.
First, the supreme court is more willing to interfere with executive action, amplifying its power as it finds reason to protect actions by the favored party and cancel actions by the disfavored party. Increasing the power of the supreme court shifts federal power towards an unelected branch that is the slowest to adjust to changing voter preference.
Second, as more power within the executive gets concentrated specifically with the president we enable more and more federal action at the whims of exactly one person. This exposes us to the current situation, where Trump is unfettered in how he wields the executive branch rather than guiding it and having its power distributed across the executive branch.
And we've also got the general popular dissatisfaction with congress and the democratic process because they can't get shit done. A country that has an enormously unfavorable opinion of congress is more primed for collapse into anti-democratic governance.
Yes, if we didn't have the filibuster then the GOP could pass all sorts of nightmare legislation. But I'd prefer legislation enabled through the will of the people to this slow collapse into authoritarianism.
> Since congress can't do anything, we naturally move more and more of the details of federal governance to executive agencies and executive orders.
It's really interesting how wildly different this is than parliamentary systems where Parliament is the ultimate authority and the executive's tenure simply ends if they lose the 'confidence' of a plurality in Parliament.
Instead we have a useless legislature as you described, and an executive whose claim to all this additional power is actually quite dubious, yet that executive controls nearly everything. I don't think a swing to the other party changes this, either (not that the DNC is capable of winning elections enough to ever hold the kind of power the GOP now has). I think from now on, the President will rule by executive action, and use creative avenues like rulings from friendly courts to vaguely legitimize this power.
An equally true statement is that republicans didn’t pass a spending bill that could attract 60 votes in the Senate. But in either case, Republicans are the majority in both houses, they write the bills and have the responsibility to write bills that can be passed and signed.
And it’s a small thing, but this is very obviously a hatch act violation and silly me, I feel like the President should be beholden to our laws.
When Democrats vote no on a measure they oppose, that's obstruction.
It’s equally true that “Senate republicans failed to put forth a spending CR that could attract 60 votes” or “Senate republicans failed to pass filibuster reform to only require 50 votes on spending measures.” Are equally true statements yet somehow they didn’t make the autoresponders. Weird.
Turning all of our apolitical institutions into megaphones for the party in power is an absolute nightmare and is illegal for a reason.
Seriously - how can you possibly defend something like this: https://www.hud.gov/
Anyway, they’re facts.
"The radical left has chosen to shut down the United States government in the name of reckless spending and obstructionism." is an appropriate message for Treasury.gov when it's illegal to use Federal resources for political messaging?
Be serious.
To summarize, you want to blame the oppositition for not passing your flavor of a spending bill, ie. one that suits your politics. Elections have consequences - and the longer Democrats drag this out the more excuse the executive branch will have to permanentely lay off people and shutdown departments.
> To summarize, you want to blame the oppositition for not passing your flavor of a spending bill, ie. one that suits your politics.
Seems a bit like projection when your summary is based on your weird assumption for who I would’ve blamed previously.
> Elections have consequences - and the longer Democrats drag this out the more excuse the executive branch will have to permanentely lay off people and shutdown departments.
That’s not how any of this works.. the Executive branch doesn’t have the constitutional ability to shut down departments or lay people off when they’re congressional mandated. This level of political science ignorance is a big part of how we got here.
Elections do have consequences and if Republicans feel that they have a mandate to kill USAID or any other department, they can pass a spending bill that zeroes it out. The President doesn’t get to decide to not spend those funds after Congress has authorized them.
It’s inconceivable to me that people don’t understand how much this line of thought and the associated actions have broken our government in ways that are going to be very difficult to undo.
The cowardice of both parties to never balance the budget in the last 50 years (Except Clinton!) has done more damage, arguably, in miring us in permanent debt.
I suspect the people who are fine with the government shutting down and who are fine with questionably legal tactics to do away with departments like USAID, feel that even though these things are probably legally wrong, they’re better than just continuing to piss away more and more of future generations’ money, money that we don’t have.
I think the greatest sin involved in all of this is the government’s ridiculous magical, thinking that they can set tax policy and spending policy independently of each other. In my opinion, one of the two should be a fixed function of the other. Either we agree on our tax rates and government benefits, automatically adjust to fit in the budget, or we agree on what we’re going to spend, and taxes automatically adjust to match — either way it should be something everyone can calculate before the bill is voted on.
To when are you referring? Because "last time", republicans were in fact also in the majority.
It is not true that Democrats blocked H.R.5371. The bill was voted on unlike say when Republicans block a bill by sending the representatives home instead of voting on say an Epstein related issue. (Recent vote was 55-45 [1] which not every R voted yay).
The lapse in appropriations cannot singular be pointed at H.R.5371.
If Republicans had stuck to their campaign promises of a balanced budget then we wouldn't be in this situation as we wouldn't need additional borrowing.
Less politically, if 60+ people had input into the bill then it would've passed. Can't be upset that somebody didn't vote for something they didn't have input in.
Only 50 votes are needed in the Senate to pass any legislation (per constitution). The whole 60-votes is a requirement that any point can be changed by the Senate and has been recently for federal judges.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5371...
Nobody asked why Republicans, which control every branch of government, need Democrats to cooperate with them to pass a budget, which only requires 50% to pass due to the special process for budget bills.
Oh, right. Because they mislabeled the One Big Beautiful Bill as a budget bill, which means they've used up their one special budget bill for the year and now the actual budget bill has to play by the rules for non-budget bills.
Skill issue.
This is incorrect.
The bill that just failed (https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5371), is an appropriations bill.
60 votes are needed, and the final vote was 55-45.
https://apnews.com/article/democrats-republicans-shutdown-ne...
What you are referring to with the "50%" is a reconciliation bill (which is what the OBBB was), which requires a simple majority (50% + 1) to pass, and cannot be filibustered.
Appropriations bills are what keep the government open. Reconciliation bills do not have this effect.
The OBBB could not have been an appropriations bill because those are designed to make changes to mandatory spending programs and taxes, while reconciliation bills are for funding discretionary government operations annually.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/13/politics/budget-resolution-re...
Also reality: there's a government shutdown because the Republicans want a government shutdown (for some reason). They've ignored so many more important laws already, there's no reason they couldn't ignore the filibuster thing, or just continue spending money without having a budget bill (like they are continuing to spend money on Israel and ICE without having a budget)
r/fednews was FULL of warnings about all the unvetted foreign computers being brought in and plugged into the networks, specifically back then to hijack the email servers
remember how they had to harvest all the emails to send out the demands for people to quit?
it's "f-kery" specifically, this has never been done by any other administration, no-one previously would dare, it violates all kinds of laws
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/27/politics/federal-employees-em...