13 questions St. Louisans have about the government shutdown, answered

Sometime soon-ish (?) after that, the motion to end debate – cloture in Senate slang – and bring the House-passed bill to fund the government for another month will be brought up for a vote.

How did we get to this point?

This resolution presented me with a hard choice: either to sign a budget-busting appropriations bill that would finance the entire government at levels well above my recommendations-and thus set back our efforts to halt the excessive Government spending that has fueled inflation and high interest rates, and destroyed investments for new jobs-or to hold the line on spending with a veto but risk interruption of government activities and services. When Congress considers a must-pass piece of legislation such as this one, both parties try to insert their top priorities in it. The Smithsonian also has two museums in New York City that would be closed – the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum and Heye Center, a branch of the National Museum of the American Indian.

“It is very clear that a federal government shutdown could inflict serious pain on everyday working people”, Cox said in the letter.

Many Republicans aren’t wild about this outcome. On Oct. 16, the Senate and House voted to fund the government until January 15 and extend the debt limit. They also believe they will win the politics of the blame game because Republicans control the House, Senate and White House.

On Wednesday, the bill’s passage was not assured, as Democrats weighed the potential political risk of voting against the measure. ThinkProgress reported that only seven Democratic senators have gone on the record and said they would vote against a spending bill without a DACA fix.

While legislators are trying to add on a number of other issues, the core fight is over the levels of spending to allocate to defense and non-defense programs. The unpredictability of Trump – as expressed most purely via his Twitter feed – makes the job of cutting a deal (or even figuring out what should be in the deal) that much more hard.

We last reported on this issue in August 2017, as the end of the USA government’s fiscal year (September 30) approached.

More than 800,000 federal employees were furloughed during the last United States government shutdown which lasted more than two weeks in 2013.

A government shutdown, as it sounds, is the closure of nonessential offices of the government.

Travel: Air traffic controllers, Transportation Security Administration officers and Customs and Border Protection agents would remain on the job, so air travel should be mostly unaffected.

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Government activities that sharply reduce or delay services or close down altogether include visitor access to national parks, monuments and museums; passport applications; mortgage approvals; government data reporting; oil and gas drilling applications; processing of small business loans; and applications for firearms permits. The second shutdown finally ended with a seven-year, balanced-budget plan that included modest spending cuts and tax increases.

Site inspections by the Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration. This pain is particularly acute in Virginia, which is home to hundreds of thousands of government employees, kids who rely on CHIP, military families, and national security professionals.

But it’s more than likely that there’s no reason to worry. The military would continue to operate normally, at least in the near term, in the event of a partial government shutdown. A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll done in December 2017 found that 63 percent of voters think Congress should avoid a government shutdown at all costs. According to the CFRB, during the 2013 shutdown, around 850,000 of the 2.1 million federal employees that are not postal workers were placed on furlough.

Historical data suggests that a big market move shaking stocks is unlikely, but a shutdown would still be concerning to investors. Republicans and Democrats are at an impasse over not only government funding, but also what to do about many young immigrants facing deportation.

“When there are shutdowns, our side usually takes the hit”, Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) told NBC News.