Democrats meet to discuss deal to reopen government | Hacker News Reader

Democrats meet to discuss deal to reopen government

thehill.com

5 pointsSilverElfin9 comments

After rejecting continuing resolutions 14 times, including clean resolutions that change nothing about federal spending, it looks like Democrats are looking for an exit path out of the shutdown. Given the timing, does this indicate the shutdown was a political tool to help with the elections? After all, it doesn’t seem logical that they would ask for temporary COVID era insurance premium subsidies to be extended, years after the pandemic, when they were intentionally set to expire. That doesn’t seem like a reason to hold the government hostage. Note that the original Obamacare premium subsidy program is unaffected and would remain in place regardless.

> That doesn’t seem like a reason to hold the government hostage.

Maybe to you. ACA subsidies are important to millions of Americans, and not expensive enough to the taxpayer to warrant cutting. I support a shutdown until an amicable solution can be found, there's no reason we should be cutting corporate tax rates while levying the cost of American healthcare.

ACA subsidies that were put into place with ACA itself, are still intact. Literally every single continuing resolution that the GOP has put forth does not touch them. What’s going away automatically at the end of the year (again not being touched by funding proposals) is an additional set of subsidies that were added as a COVID emergency measure. The funding resolution doesn’t do anything about those either - they just happen to expire at the end of this year, which is completely expected. After all, they were temporary.

Just to reiterate in case it isn’t clear, one side (Republicans) is not making any changes. The other side is refusing to fund the government in a way that makes no changes. Instead, they’re asking for a change and in an odd way (by extending emergency measures) rather than by passing legislation that, for example, changes how the ACA works.

Still trying that "it's the democrats' fault" angle, huh?

gottado what you gotta do… :)

> rather than by passing legislation that, for example, changes how the ACA works.

Republicans have the majority. If they perceive that to be a solution, why won't agree they implement it?

Fun fact: republicans hold a majority in both chambers. The government shut down because republicans won't vote for their own bills.

Yes, the republicans hold a majority in the Senate, but the Senate rules require 60 votes to stop debate on a bill (ie cloture). So, the Democratic members are holding up the CR by not voting for cloture.

Cloture is a very valuable tool for the minority in the Senate to keep the majority in check. Cloture is just a rule which can be changed by just a majority vote. I think it's a mistake for either party to do away with this rule. For example, during the Obama Administration, the Democratic members of the Senate changed the rules to allow federal judges to be approved with just majority vote. Then, during the first Trump Administration, the Republican members changed the rules to include supreme court judges, which lead to the current supreme court.

There were 45 no votes on the clean continuing resolutions. That’s enough to block funding of the government. A majority is not sufficient.

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