WASHINGTON – Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives released details early Thursday about how much federal disaster aid each state would lose if Republicans stripped it from a stopgap bill that was rejected by their own members as well as President-elect Donald Trump.
The distribution of the roughly $100 billion among individual states came just hours after Trump and many of his closest allies, including tech billionaire Elon Musk, urged Republican leaders in Congress to back away from a bipartisan year-end spending package .
This short-term spending bill, or a version of it, must take effect before midnight Friday or a partial government shutdown would begin. A partial shutdown would stop payroll payments to federal employees and U.S. troops just before the holiday season.
The tear down shows that states hit by hurricanes and other natural disasters such as California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, more would miss out on more than $2 billion each, although the numbers for the larger states are over $10 billion.
Misinformation about salary increases
The Stalemate on short-term expenses bill began shortly after Congress leaders published the 1,547-page package on Tuesday evening.
Spokesman Mike Johnson defended some of the irrelevant measures during a news conference Tuesday ahead of the release and during an interview with Fox News Wednesday morning.
The Louisiana Republican reiterated the need for disaster relief and economic aid for farmers, even though the spending package includes dozens of unrelated items, including a provision that would allow the nationwide sale of gasoline laced with 15% ethanol all year round.
The bill too dropped a long-standing provision that prevented members of Congress from receiving annual cost-of-living adjustments Salary escalate.
There was significant misinformation Wednesday about how much of a raise lawmakers would get in the next Congress, angering people who didn’t have access to the correct numbers.
The false numbers were shared by many online, but attracted particular attention from Musk, who advocated shutting down the government in front of Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance weighed in later on Wednesday.
Legislators would receive a maximum 3.8% raise, raising their annual salary from $174,000 to $180,600, according to a lawmaker report published in September by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. The Legislature has not received a COLA escalate since January 2009.
Sudden demand for debt limitation
The overall package, which congressional leaders and committees negotiated for weeks, would have given Congress until March 14 to negotiate a bicameral agreement on the dozen annual government funding bills that would take effect by the start of the fiscal year on October 1.
Republicans wanted to hold off on full-year spending bills until they have unified control of the government next year.
The package would have given lawmakers until Sept. 30 to hammer out an agreement on the five-year farm bill, which they were supposed to have completed work on well over a year ago.
Trump on Wednesday pushed for lawmakers to include the debt ceiling in negotiations, with only about two days left before the shutdown deadline. Developing a bipartisan agreement to escalate or suspend the country’s borrowing powers typically requires months of discussions.
Trump said he didn’t want to deal with the debt limit debate once his second term begins Jan. 20, preferring to keep it on President Joe Biden’s record.
Trump NBC News said Thursday morning that he wanted Congress to eliminate the debt ceiling entirely, which marked a significant shift in the Republicans’ approach to the borrowing limit.
Republicans typically employ the debt ceiling debate to push for spending cuts, although not always successfully.
Democratic leaders in Congress maintain they will not renegotiate with Republicans, which would prevent a Republican-only bill from becoming law before the deadline. While the GOP controls the House of Representatives, Democrats currently control the Senate and hold the White House.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in a speech Thursday morning that Republican power struggles over the bipartisan bill risked an unnecessary government shutdown.
“Unfortunately, House Republicans appear to be in shambles,” Schumer said. “But as they try to put things together, they should remember one thing: The only way to get things done is through bipartisan cooperation.”
Jeffries calls for vote on emergency solution
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., did not entirely rule out his party’s lawmakers voting for a scaled-back stopgap spending bill, but urged GOP leaders to stick with the version they had been negotiating for weeks.
“This reckless, Republican-driven shutdown can be avoided if House Republicans simply do what is right for the American people and abide by the bipartisan agreement they themselves negotiated,” Jeffries said at a news conference on Thursday.
Trump’s insistence that the package address the debt limit in some way was “premature at best,” he said.
Jeffries also said Democrats would not give Johnson additional votes to secure the gavel in January if several of his GOP colleagues refuse to vote for him in a floor vote.
Numerous right-wing Republicans have hinted or said outright that they might not support continuing Johnson as speaker because of their complaints about provisions in the stopgap bill.
Republicans will hold an extremely narrow majority in the House of Representatives next year, meaning Johnson has just a few votes to lose before the GOP would enter the speaker’s race overtime for the third time in just two years.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy began this congressional session in January 2023 and had to go through 15 votes before he was able to do so to secure the votes needed Become a speaker.
republican vote for removal His election just over a year ago resulted in the nomination of several GOP speakers who were unable to get the 218 votes needed to become speaker or who chose not to do so at all to try first.
The Republicans nominated the majority leader in the House of Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and Minnesota Tom Emmer before landing on Johnson, who was able to win a vote in plenary.
Musk as a speaker?
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the tried to oust Johnson as speaker but failed in May, the decision to pick someone else may have been guided by Musk. The Constitution is hushed on the question of whether the Speaker must be a member of the House of Representatives.
“The establishment needs to be broken up just like it was yesterday,” Greene said wrote on social media. “That could be the way.”
This report was updated with state-by-state numbers, which were revised later Thursday morning by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Last updated on December 19, 2024 at 1:32 p.m
