Hassett, on Sunday, warned that Democrats needed to come to the table on Monday or the White House would take action.<\/p>\n
“I think that President Trump and Russ Vought are lining things up and getting ready to act if they have to, but hoping that they don’t,\u201d he told CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper. Layoffs will begin “if the president decides that the negotiations are absolutely going nowhere.”<\/p>\n
Hassett added that he hoped “we can get the Democrats to see that it’s just common sense to avoid layoffs like that.”<\/p>\n Speaker Mike Johnson, on CBS and NBC, laid the blame for those potential layoffs squarely on Democrats \u2014 despite criticism that his party controls both chambers of Congress and the White House, the latter of which is making the threats.<\/p>\n Johnson, denying that he or the president \u201cwanted\u201d to use the threat of mass firings as leverage, told CBS\u2019s\u00a0Face the Nation\u00a0<\/em>that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was to blame for his\u00a0caucus opposing\u00a0a House-passed clean continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government. Schumer opposed using a shutdown as leverage to halt DOGE cuts earlier this year, but is now backing that strategy in the hopes of forcing Republicans to extend subsidies for Obamacare public exchange health care plans.<\/p>\n Democrats are not buying the president\u2019s threats or the White House\u2019s\u00a0attempts to soften the language used by some advisers to the president \u2014 and Trump himself \u2014 about potentially engaging in mass firings seemingly for the purpose of scoring political points.<\/p>\n Members of the minority party attacked Trump for claiming he\u2019d target \u201cDemocrat agencies,\u201d rhetoric which suggested to many of the president\u2019s critics that he viewed federal agencies as inherently hostile to his agenda.<\/p>\n A Republican senator\u2019s comment to Fox News this past week, suggesting that Russell Vought, the president\u2019s director of the Office of Management and Budget,\u00a0had been waiting \u201csince puberty\u201d\u00a0to carry out mass layoffs, was also a revealing look into the divide among the president\u2019s defenders on the issue.<\/p>\n “As for the Speaker telling you or not telling you his position on the president threatening the mass layoffs of federal employees \u2014 there’s no one forcing him to do that,\u201d Sen. Adam Schiff told MSNBC on Sunday.<\/p>\n \u201cHe will do that because he wants to do that, because he and Russell both want to cause even more pain for the American people,\u201d added the senator.<\/p>\n And Schumer, on CBS and NBC, responded that Johnson and his fellow Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, were being dishonest when they claimed they were open to negotiations on the topic of Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) subsidies \u2014 but only after Democrats voted to reopen the government.<\/p>\n \u201cLater means never,\u201d the Democratic Senate leader told Margaret Brennan. \u201cJohnson does not want to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe’s just not serious about it, as exemplified by him sending the House home for two weeks,\u201d added Schumer.<\/p>\n Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, are reportedly equally divided over the prospect of causing further federal chaos to put pressure on the Democrats. Some warn that the strategy risks collapsing the remaining credibility Republicans have with some voters over the shutdown fight.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is certainly the most moral high ground Republicans have had in a moment like this that I can recall, and I just don\u2019t like squandering that political capital when you have that kind of high ground,\u201d Sen. Kevin Cramer, a Republican, told CNN last week.<\/p>\n Trump himself has kept up the pressure on Democrats in his own way \u2014 by issuing threats \u2014 while on Sunday, he attacked Fox News for the conservative network\u2019s decision to invite a Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, on air to discuss the shutdown.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy is Fox News and Peter Doocy putting on Democrat Senator Mark Kelly to talk about, totally unabated or challenged, Healthcare?\u201d Trump said, before seemingly suggesting that the cable network should pick whether or not it to remain on his side: \u201cFox should either get on board, or get off board, NOW, but at this point, it just doesn\u2019t make any difference to me. They suck up the Ratings because of us, and then spin them in the Democrats\u2019 direction.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A top adviser to Donald Trump echoed\u00a0the president\u2019s threats\u00a0of\u00a0mass federal layoffs\u00a0across the government if Democrats in Congress do<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-us"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2001"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2003,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions\/2003"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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