WASHINGTON — Republicans are threatening to exact maximum pain on Democrats who are refusing to reopen the government, which shut down on Tuesday, including by enacting wide-scale layoffs of federal workers and freezing billions of dollars in blue states.
“The longer this goes on, the more pain will be inflicted. Every single bit of this was entirely avoidable,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said at a press conference on Wednesday.
Johnson also said ominously on Fox Business that Democrats have “handed the keys to the kingdom to the executive branch under President Trump to do some things that we would not otherwise be able to do because we would never get Democrat votes for them.”
And speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Donald Trump was even more blunt, explicitly threatening partisan payback during the shutdown: “A lot of good can come down from shutdowns. We get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
Meanwhile, Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget at the White House, announced Wednesday a hold on previously approved federal funding for projects in New York, which is represented mostly by Democrats ― in particular the top Democrats in the House and Senate, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer.
