Americans don’t want their representatives to bow to the pressures of the government shutdown.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are hearing the same message from their constituents, whether they’re in vulnerable districts or partisan strongholds, reported MSNBC Monday: “Keep up the fight.”
“Almost to a T, I hear from people that they want us to keep fighting for them, that they want us to stand up and they don’t want us to cave,” Democratic Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal told the network.
The pressure would suggest that Americans are not interested in having their parties reach a resolution to continue funding the government. Instead, they’d rather the shutdown carry on.
“It won’t surprise you, being from a red state, that most of the calls are encouraging Republicans to stand their ground and keep up the fight,” GOP Indiana Senator Todd Young told MSNBC.
More than 700,000 federal employees have been furloughed under the auspices of the shutdown, according to a report from the Bipartisan Policy Center. Congress has yet to pass either a stop-gap funding measure or full-year appropriations bill to bring the shutdown to a close. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has axed thousands of federal employees.
Monday marked the twentieth day that the government has stayed shuttered as Republicans and Democrats disagree over how to fund Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget, which included details to slice billions from Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid.
Democrats—and their constituents—have insisted that party representatives hold firm until they can find a way to salvage the subsidized health care programs. But a major hitch looms on the horizon: Open enrollment for Obamacare plans begins on November 1. If the shutdown is not resolved by then, millions of Americans will be forced to make a decision about their health coverage without knowing whether premiums will come down.
Democratic Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin told MSNBC that “the vast majority of people I’m hearing from and seeing insist that we hang tough to resolve the health care crisis and the government shutdown at the same time.”
“We don’t have the luxury of choosing here,” Raskin said.
The issue, remarkably, has not gotten a lot of play in congressional offices around the country. Politicians on both sides of the aisle remarked to MSNBC that they were surprised by the minimal volume of calls about the shutdown their offices have received.
“I know there are a lot of Americans who are anxious about the shutdown, but I just don’t know that, until the last couple of days, there’s been a whole lot of engagement,” Young told MSNBC last week.
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