ANALYSIS:
Congressional leaders have spent much of the government shutdown holding press conferences, appearing on cable news and otherwise hammering home their respective party narratives at every opportunity.
The relentless messaging campaign has unleashed a whirlwind of political spin, with obfuscation and twisting of facts clouding several inconvenient truths about the partisan impasse.
‘Clean’ vs. ‘dirty’
Republicans describe their stopgap bill to continue the previous fiscal year spending levels and policies through Nov. 21 as “clean,” while Democrats counter that it’s “dirty.”
The conventional Washington definition of a “clean” continuing resolution, as spending stopgaps are called, is a mostly straight extension of existing funding levels with minor adjustments called “anomalies” for programs that require more flexibility.
A “clean” continuing resolution cannot contain any partisan policy riders or added spending supported by only one party.
The Republican stopgap bill meets those standards. It includes extra money to provide security for lawmakers, judges and executive branch officials amid rising political threats, but that funding has bipartisan support.
Democrats have not objected to a single provision but say the continuing resolution is “dirty.”
“The House Republican partisan spending bill is a dirty piece of legislation that continues to gut the health care of the American people, and it’s riddled with toxic, right-wing Republican priorities because it’s connected to a March spending bill that Democrats in the House uniformly rejected,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Democrat, said recently on MSNBC.
The Republican stopgap contains no specific provisions to gut health care, as Mr. Jeffries claimed. However, he is correct that the March measure increased funding for Republican priorities, such as immigration enforcement and the military, while cutting $13 billion from nondefense spending, which includes health care.
Although the March continuing resolution was not “clean,” 10 Senate Democrats supported a procedural vote, locking those Republican adjustments to Biden-era spending levels into law.
The continuing resolution that Senate Democrats are now filibustering is a clean extension of those spending levels.
A Harvard-Harris poll released Monday showed that 65% of respondents believe Democrats should end the shutdown by accepting a continuing resolution at current spending levels.
The Republican unity, except for one senator and two House members, is atypical. Most past stopgap votes have split the party.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, dismissed his previous opposition to continuing resolutions as “different circumstances, different times.”
“When the Democrats were trying to put their partisan priorities in, we were trying to use whatever leverage we had in the minority to take them out,” Mr. Johnson said.
That was not always the case. Mr. Johnson voted against a clean continuing resolution offered by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican who was ousted from his role over that move.
That cleared the way for Mr. Johnson’s surprise ascension through the Republican ranks. He promised as speaker to end governance by continuing resolution, but he has failed to deliver.
“One of the things we objected to back then was these were Biden-level policies and spending,” Mr. Johnson said this week. “I still object to that, but what I’m trying to do is keep the government open so that we can readjust those things.”
Health care for ‘illegals’
A top Republican talking point is that Democrats shut down the government because they want to provide government health care to illegal immigrants.
“Democrats have chosen to put illegal aliens over hardworking Americans,” said House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain of Michigan. “They are fighting to give illegals health care on your dime.”
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said Republicans are using “crazy lies” to distract from broader health care cost issues.
“The biggest one of all, which Johnson’s been caught at many times, is that illegal, undocumented immigrants get federal dollars,” he said. “They don’t.”
The reality is much more nuanced than either of those statements suggests, but Mr. Schumer is mostly correct.
Democrats’ leveraging the shutdown to force a negotiation on health care has never been about immigrants. Still, they opened the door to Republican attacks with their counterproposal to the continuing resolution that would repeal the entire health care section of the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That law made several changes to restrict immigrants’ access to health care through Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare.
“Medicaid is intended for U.S. citizens only, not illegals who break our law and come over the border,” Mr. Johnson said Monday.
Most of those Republican provisions, however, target immigrants with temporary legal statuses, who are not technically illegal immigrants.
As Mr. Schumer pointed out, federal law specifically bars illegal immigrants from accessing government benefits, including Medicaid, Medicare and subsidized Obamacare plans.
The Republican bill removes access to those programs for broad categories of noncitizens, including refugees and immigrants who were granted parole, asylum and other temporary statuses. Before the measure was enacted, those immigrants were eligible for Medicaid after the first five years of U.S. residency.
Republicans say the Biden administration abused parole and other temporary immigrant programs. Still, that doesn’t make those immigrants illegal.
Mr. Johnson has notably shifted his rhetoric to include noncitizens.
“What [Democrats] are demanding to reopen the government and get it working for the American people again would result in nearly $200 billion being spent on health care services for illegal immigrants and other noncitizens,” he said Tuesday.
Medicaid is funded primarily by the federal government, but states share a portion of the costs. The law does not bar states from spending their own funds on health care access for illegal immigrants.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act seeks to crack down on such funding with a provision designed to ensure states can’t artificially inflate provider taxes they use to finance Medicaid. Whether that would stop states from giving illegal immigrants health care access has not been proved.
The only health care provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that directly addresses illegal immigrants deals with emergency Medicaid, which reimburses hospitals for emergency care provided to individuals who would meet the requirements for Medicaid if not for their immigration status.
States that expanded Medicaid to cover able-bodied adults without dependents earning up to 138% of the poverty level get a 90% federal reimbursement for the expansion population compared with the lower, varied rates for the traditional Medicaid population, such as low-income parents and children and people with disabilities.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act does not restrict illegal immigrants from receiving emergency Medicaid. Still, it would reduce the federal reimbursement rate for illegal immigrants who fall under the expansion population to match the lower rate provided for the traditional population.
‘Republican health care crisis’
Democrats say their goal is to address the “Republican health care crisis.”
That umbrella phrase covers the $1 trillion in Medicaid funding cuts and other health care provisions Republicans enacted in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will cause 10 million people to lose health insurance over the next decade.
It also includes other unilateral actions from the Trump administration, such as freezing National Institutes of Health grants.
“We know that because of the Republican health care crisis and their refusal to address the Affordable Care Act tax credits that are on the brink of expiring that millions of Americans are about to see their health care costs double, triple or quadruple,” Mr. Jeffries said.
The characterization of the “Republican health care crisis” overlooks the fact that Democrats enacted and expanded the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits without Republican votes. The base credits do not expire, but the expansion is set to sunset on Dec. 31 because of two laws Democrats enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.
Mr. Schumer lied about that in a social media video.
“The so-called big beautiful bill, which is really a big ugly betrayal, cuts $1 trillion from health care and causes the ACA credits to expire,” he said.
Mr. Schumer continued to dodge responsibility when directly asked why Democrats put an expiration date on the enhanced subsidies if they are so critical.
“Well, this was passed a while ago, but we want to extend them. That’s the point,” he said Wednesday.
Later that afternoon, Mr. Jeffries accused Republicans of “peddling a lie that the current structure of the Affordable Care Act relates to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“It has nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said. “The Affordable Care Act tax credits were put into place as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.”
That’s not true, even if you assume Mr. Jeffries is talking only about the expanded version of the credits that opened the subsidies to families earning more than 400% of the federal poverty line and capped out-of-pocket premium costs at 8.5% of household income.
That was first implemented as a temporary two-year boost in the Democrats’ 2021 pandemic relief law, the American Rescue Plan.
Democrats then used the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to extend the expansion through 2025, intentionally aligning the expiration date with temporary provisions of Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax law in hopes of a bipartisan negotiation over both.
What Democrats could not anticipate was that Republicans would have full control of Congress and the White House this year to extend the 2017 tax cuts independently. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act and all the aforementioned partisan laws were passed using the budget reconciliation process, which is exempt from the Senate filibuster.
Democrats were left without their planned leverage point to force a negotiation on the Obamacare subsidies, so they chose the Sept. 30 government funding deadline.
‘Dec. 31 policy issue’
Another source of spin surrounds how long Congress has to act to extend the enhanced Obamacare subsidies.
Because the statute does not expire until the end of the year, Mr. Johnson has repeatedly called it a “Dec. 31 policy issue” that should be separate from funding the government.
Although the speaker is correct about the expiration date, Congress cannot wait until Dec. 31 to act to make any impact on premiums.
Insurers have largely locked in premium rates for 2026. They can make some adjustments until Obamacare open enrollment begins Nov. 1, but rates will remain unchanged if Congress does not act before then, the Congressional Budget Office said.
Mr. Johnson claimed this week that Republicans were “always planning to have those discussions in the month of October,” but Democrats don’t believe him.
“Johnson is the true roadblock here,” Mr. Schumer said. “He doesn’t want to have a vote on ACA.”
• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.
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