(Washington) The United States will probably experience a new week of budgetary paralysis after the rejection on Thursday for the seventh time by the Senate of a text which would have lifted this “shutdown”, and despite threats from Donald Trump to make the opposition give in.
Elected Democrats and Republicans alike have remained firm in their positions since 1er October and the start of this blockage which resulted in the technical unemployment of more than 700,000 federal civil servants.
“The shutdown was, you know, pretty bad. Well, not yet, because it’s still early, but it’s getting worse over time,” Donald Trump said Thursday, during a long monologue during a meeting of his cabinet.
The leader of the Republicans in the Senate, John Thune, told the Semafor media outlet that the upper house would probably not vote over the weekend, saying he doubted there would be any point in doing so given the current impasse.
Republicans are proposing an extension of the current budget, with the same spending levels, while Democrats are calling for an extension of subsidies for health insurance programs for low-income households.
Donald Trump’s party has a majority in both houses of Congress, but due to Senate rules, 60 votes out of 100 are needed to pass a budget. In the current state of forces, at least eight members of the opposition should rally to the republican text, but only three have done so so far.
The leaders of the presidential majority, however, hope to succeed in getting more to give in as the days go by.
In a desire to put pressure, Donald Trump reiterated his threats towards the opposing camp.
“We are going to eliminate certain programs that are very popular with Democrats and which are not popular with Republicans, frankly, because that’s how it works,” declared the American president during the cabinet meeting.
“They wanted to do that, so we’re going to return the favor,” he told the press.
Throughout the duration of the blockage, all of the more than 2.3 million federal civil servants are not paid, as are the more than 1.3 million military personnel.
The latter are expected to miss their first pay next Wednesday, a deadline which should increase popular pressure on Congress to break the deadlock, given the importance of the armed forces in the culture of the United States.
