Democrats’ government shutdown claims don’t stand up | Opinion
When I read that the Pentagon has the time, energy, technology and personnel to track what military and civilian employees are saying about Charlie Kirk’s death so those who slight the assassinated young man can be disciplined, I am almost glad the federal government has been shut down. Surely, during the interim there will be some time for our leaders to rethink their priorities.
But that presupposes that we have any leaders at all in this shutdown mess. Listening to the debate over who is to blame and how we got to this impasse, makes me wonder if there are any left.
To start, Democrats deny any blame. “Republicans shut down the government,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said this week. That’s a lie.
Republicans have voted more than a dozen times to keep the government open through November without controversial policy changes while the parties work out their spending differences. Democrats, in near lockstep, have voted against that measure.
Democrats are the ones who have voted to close government. That is just a fact.
And it is Democratic budget games that created this impasse in the first place. It was a Democratic Congress and President Joe Biden who wrote into law that the emergency COVID expansions to Affordable Care Act subsidies would sunset this year. They did that so that they could claim that the cost of their legislation was a fraction of reality.
Don’t take my word for it, listen to what the Bipartisan Policy Center wrote at the time: “It is a time-honored, bipartisan practice to diminish the apparent costs of tax cuts or new benefits by ‘sunsetting’ the provisions. However, once these desirable provisions are enacted, Congress rarely takes them away, particularly when the benefits are enjoyed by a large swath of the country or a broad set of business interests.”
Democrats are lying to you now about the cause of a problem they created by lying to you in 2021 about $3.6 trillion in deficit spending. It is not a good look.
But as the BPC stated, this is a “bipartisan practice.” Indeed, earlier this year in the One Big Beautiful Bill or whatever we are calling it, much of the expense was in ending the sunset on tax cuts from the first Trump administration. Back then Trump and his Republican allies wanted to lie to you about the costs of their tax cuts so they pretended the tax rates would be raised later on even though they had every intention of blocking that from happening. That not good look the Democrats have today is a mirror image of the one Republicans had a couple months ago.
At the same time, Republicans are claiming that this impasse isn’t about Affordable Care Act subsidies for Americans at all, but about Democrats’ efforts to subsidize undocumented immigrants through Medicaid.
There is one way undocumented immigrants can get their healthcare paid for by Medicaid: That’s to go to the emergency room with an urgent medical problem like, say, a gunshot wound.
Who came up with the crazy idea that we shouldn’t let what were then called illegal immigrants bleed out at the entrance to a hospital that could have saved them? Well, it was in bipartisan budget legislation signed by Republican Ronald Reagan.
I don’t know of any Republicans in the Senate who are eager to reverse this policy and explain the dead bodies to their constituents.
Democrats, too, are being a little cute about the question of undocumented immigrants. The Democratic Biden administration lost control of America’s southern border letting millions of people enter the country without going through the legal immigration process. About three million of them later applied for asylum or got some other kind of temporary legal status transforming them from people who entered our country illegally, into temporarily legal immigrants. These millions of people qualify for Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies.
I can forgive Republicans and their many immigration-skeptical voters for thinking this distinction amounts to giving taxpayer dollars to undocumented immigrants, even if it is not true on a technicality.
On balance, during this shutdown, Democrats are the ones who seem to be the most dishonest in making their case to voters. But who are the last people in Washington who can get all Emily Post about truth-telling in the public square? Trump and his supporters. They’ve never met a fib, half-truth or outright lie they won’t spread if it serves a momentary partisan purpose.
A case in point was just revealed by the shutdown itself. Back during the campaign, Donald Trump said he didn’t know anything about and hadn’t read the blueprint for his administration put together by the Heritage Foundation for his campaign called Project 2025. That was always obviously false, but this week Trump announced on his Truth Social that he’d be meeting with one of the report’s authors (who has a budget job in the administration) to discuss which parts of the government should suffer permanent layoffs during the temporary shutdown. So much for not knowing anything about Project 2025.
If the only good thing that comes out of the Democrat’s government shutdown is a roadblock to the Charlie Kirk cancel-culture brigade at the Pentagon, that’s more than our dishonest leaders deserve.
This story was originally published October 3, 2025 at 11:43 AM with the headline "Democrats’ government shutdown claims don’t stand up | Opinion."
