President Trump and his Republican legislative allies are lying that the U.S. government shutdown, now in its third day, was caused by congressional Democrats wanting to give federally subsidized health care to undocumented immigrants, something that longstanding law expressly prohibits, not that MAGA cares much about the law anyway.
What the Dems are really trying to do is protect already existing health care subsidies that help regular New Yorkers and people around the country afford their health insurance and treatment. So let’s tell it like it is: Trump and his MAGA legislators want to take health care away from people, and they are willing to shut down the government and hurt millions of federal workers and the economies of the communities they live and — which is every community in the country — while cutting back on crucial government services to do it.
Plenty of cities and states, including ours, do provide some type of insurance or managed-health plans for undocumented immigrants, but they do it out of their own budgets because they understand that we all end up paying for chronic illnesses and emergency room visits in the end, far more in the long term if we don’t have preventative care.
But Trump is completely uninterested in debating any of these policies on the merits, instead resorting to lying about what’s happening and attempting to illegally impose policy preferences on everyone else.
Like the pre-shutdown attempts to cut appropriated antiterror funds for New York — which Trump has explicitly said are due to our refusal to go along with his monarchic announcements on “DEI” and other matters — this is illegal. So was the effort to pull Justice Department grants during his first term. Trump simply doesn’t care; he’ll move right on ahead until a judge tells him to stop, and then he’ll do it again.
Yesterday, the president said he was going to meet with Russ Vought, his OMB director and a primary author of Project 2025 “to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
This wholesale chopping of the government is what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer feared would happen in March so he agreed to the GOP spending plan in order to avoid it. This time Schumer said no and the Republicans are proclaiming the “Schumer shutdown.” But if Trump follows through on his threats and fires thousands, why is that Schumer’s fault?
And, of course, the legality of any such firings would be before the federal courts.
We can only reiterate what has been clear from the beginning of Trump’s second term: the administration has no qualms about doing something unlawful, courts be damned. Our checks and balances require all three of the independent branches to jealousy guard their prerogatives and push back on the others. But that’s not working now because the GOP legislators are too afraid to buck Trump.
This Republican Congress, cowed into submission by the vindictive president, has no backbone to resist the continued usurpation of their Article I authority under the Constitution. In our system, the power of the purse belongs to the legislature, not the executive. And a failure to have a budget plan in place doesn’t change that.
