Democrats in Congress are taking a hard-line stance in the Senate on the new continuing resolution that will fund the government into November.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, said that he and his fellow Democrats will not vote for the continuing resolution that earlier passed in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Schumer and his caucus have further dug into their position in the week that Congress has been away from Washington, and they appear ready to not provide the needed votes to avert a partial government shutdown by September 30.
Republicans are calling foul on their position and contend that their rhetoric is hypocritical to their stance from earlier this year, when Senate Democrats — including Schumer — voted to keep the government open.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, contended that their position now is completely counter to the one they held in March when the government was again on the brink of closure, especially given their concerns that the Trump administration and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would move ahead with mass firings.
"The argument they made was that you don't want to give Trump — basically by shutting the government down — carte blanche to do whatever he wants to do with these government agencies, and, you know, to let the OMB make decisions about who's essential and who isn't," Thune said on "The Hugh Hewitt Show."
The Office of Management and Budget said that the Trump administration's plans to eliminate thousands of government jobs amounted to "intimidation".
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