In a slow end to the longest administrative shutdown in US history, it was the House of Representatives’ turn on Wednesday to approve it. Its 435 members met fully for the first time since September 19 to vote on the proposal to reopen government funding, which was approved on Monday in the Senate after seven Democrats and one independent defected to the Republican ranks the day before.
There were 222 If so (216 Republicans and six Democrats) by 209 it’s not (202 Democrats and 7 Republicans). The only thing left to do is Donald Trump’s signature — scheduled during a ceremony announced at 9:45 p.m. (Washington time) – to be able to finish closeThis is what Washington calls the partial lock-in of public funds, and it is a recurring threat that materializes when the two parties do not agree on budget issues. This time it lasted 43 days and broke all records for not reaching an agreement on Capitol Hill.
With the president’s signature, normal life will gradually return to dozens of closed federal agencies, monuments, and national parks that are closed or unmonitored, as well as to major airports in the United States, which have had thousands of flights canceled and tens of thousands of delays due to the effects of the Corona virus. close In air traffic controllers and security personnel, officials are considered “essential” and therefore have to work without pay. As for the rest, about 750,000, they were suspended from work and received their salaries during these weeks.
It is not clear when all these problems can be considered unresolved; Especially airports. Nor to what extent the 42 million food stamp beneficiaries (SNAP) will ultimately be affected. The Trump administration tried by all means not to pay the corresponding amounts for November, and the Supreme Court intervened last Friday to agree with the White House in that effort.
The agreement that reopens public funds includes providing funding to the federal administration until the end of January, when there may be a new crisis. Funding the vouchers through fiscal year 2026 and committing that the Trump administration will reinstate fired officials within those 43 days. It will also retroactively pay unpaid salaries to those who kept their jobs and that it will not lay off any more federal employees over the next two and a half months.
More important is what this agreement does not include. Most importantly, in the case of the Democrats, who are once again facing an internal crisis just a week after the resounding electoral victories in New York, Virginia and New Jersey, which allowed them to overcome the previous elections. Republicans are not committed to expanding part of the health coverage included in Obamacare (a law named after the president who inspired it). They are subsidies approved during the pandemic, and their expected end will lead to higher health insurance prices for 24 million Americans. They agreed to vote on this support soon, although it does not appear that this initiative will succeed on Capitol Hill.
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dr Speaker Mike Johnson kept her on leave for 54 days, with this unprecedented gesture, to try to blame Democrats for the effects of the administration shutdown. The last thing the representatives did before they took indefinite leave was to approve the budget plan, which later did not receive the necessary support in the Senate, with a qualified majority of 60 votes that did not arrive until Sunday, after 14 votes failed. At the time, Democrats did not want to support the plan that would have kept the department open, closed since October 1.
During that period, Johnson also refused — and everything suggests, due to political calculations based on his unwavering loyalty to Trump — to allow Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva (Ariz.) to be sworn in after she won a special election on September 22 to succeed her father, Raul Grijalva, who died in January.
Grijalva vote
He finally achieved that on Wednesday afternoon. The first thing he did was sign a petition with his people to force a vote in Congress. If it goes ahead, which is also unlikely, it will force the White House to release all the files that the Justice Department has linked to the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the millionaire pedophile who died in 2019 in a maximum-security cell while awaiting trial. Johnson set this vote for next week.
Democrats and the handful of Republicans who allow them to add the necessary 218 votes (Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace) want to know the contents of those papers, which the Justice Department promised months ago would see the light of day until last July when Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a statement, signed by FBI Director Kash Patel, in which they changed their minds and announced that they would no longer distribute them. to them.
This Wednesday, new emails from Epstein were revealed, released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, in which Trump was repeatedly mentioned. The two were friends for 15 years, until they broke up in 2004. That is, before the first trial against the financier and also before the real estate mogul and reality TV star became president for the first time.
The White House’s sudden refusal to shed light on those files raised suspicions that they contained something that Trump did not want to know. At the beginning of the summer, these maneuvers caused the most serious crisis among his followers in the MAGA world (short for the Trump slogan Make America Great Again). Conspiracy theorists have suspected for years that these files contain a list of the names of the rich and famous involved in Epstein’s crimes, and were not published to protect them. The financier did not commit suicide, as confirmed by the forensic report.
Until the Trump administration releases all of that material, Congress has been receiving papers from Epstein’s family in batches since August. The emails released Tuesday are consistent with the latest shipment from last week. Bundy has the complete file, as he mentioned, on the table in his office.
Trump maintains that he knows nothing about his old friend’s crimes. On Wednesday, he dismissed these new revelations as another manifestation of a “Democratic hoax” to divert attention from the end of the administration’s slow-moving shutdown.
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