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Tag: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries

  • ‘We’re going to get this job done’: GOP Leaders see narrow path to end partial shutdown Tuesday

    The House is expected to vote today on a funding bill aimed at ending the partial government shutdown, with President Donald Trump urging lawmakers to act swiftly despite Democratic calls for changes to immigration operations.The deal that passed the Senate last week funds the government through the rest of the fiscal year, except for the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers would have until Feb. 13 to negotiate Homeland Security funding and immigration enforcement provisions. On Monday, Trump told both sides in the House to send the bill to his desk without any delays, expressing his desire to see the government reopen as soon as possible. “We need to get the Government open, and I hope all Republicans and Democrats will join me in supporting this Bill, and send it to my desk WITHOUT DELAY,” the president wrote on social media.However, many Democrats want to see changes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol operations before anything is signed.”The American people want to see the masks come off. The American people want to see body cameras turned on, and mandated. The American people want to see judicial warrants,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.House Speaker Mike Johnson argues that requiring immigration officers to remove masks would not have support from Republicans, as it could lead to problems if their personal images and private information are posted online by protesters. Passing this legislation could be a challenge because Johnson is working with a razor-thin majority and can only afford to lose one Republican defection, but he is confident he will pull it off.”We’re going to get this job done, get the government reopened. Democrats are going to play games and the American people can see who really cares,” Johnson said.Lawmakers from both parties are concerned the shutdown will disrupt the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which they rely on to help people after deadly snowstorms and other disasters.Keep watching for the latest from the Washington News Bureau:

    WASHINGTON —

    The House is expected to vote today on a funding bill aimed at ending the partial government shutdown, with President Donald Trump urging lawmakers to act swiftly despite Democratic calls for changes to immigration operations.

    The deal that passed the Senate last week funds the government through the rest of the fiscal year, except for the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers would have until Feb. 13 to negotiate Homeland Security funding and immigration enforcement provisions.

    On Monday, Trump told both sides in the House to send the bill to his desk without any delays, expressing his desire to see the government reopen as soon as possible.

    “We need to get the Government open, and I hope all Republicans and Democrats will join me in supporting this Bill, and send it to my desk WITHOUT DELAY,” the president wrote on social media.

    However, many Democrats want to see changes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol operations before anything is signed.

    “The American people want to see the masks come off. The American people want to see body cameras turned on, and mandated. The American people want to see judicial warrants,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

    House Speaker Mike Johnson argues that requiring immigration officers to remove masks would not have support from Republicans, as it could lead to problems if their personal images and private information are posted online by protesters.

    Passing this legislation could be a challenge because Johnson is working with a razor-thin majority and can only afford to lose one Republican defection, but he is confident he will pull it off.

    “We’re going to get this job done, get the government reopened. Democrats are going to play games and the American people can see who really cares,” Johnson said.

    Lawmakers from both parties are concerned the shutdown will disrupt the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which they rely on to help people after deadly snowstorms and other disasters.

    Keep watching for the latest from the Washington News Bureau:


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  • President Trump signs bill to reopen government, ending longest shutdown in US history

    (CNN) — President Donald Trump late Wednesday signed a funding package to reopen the federal government, officially bringing a close to the longest shutdown in history.

    The final approval came hours after the House voted 222 to 209 to pass a deal struck between Republicans and centrist Senate Democrats that keeps the government running through January and ensures some key agencies will be funded for the remainder of fiscal year 2026.

    The agreement, which ended a record 43-day stalemate in Congress, will also reverse the mass federal layoffs carried out by Trump during the shutdown. It paves the way for paychecks to flow to government employees, as well as the resumption of critical food and nutrition services relied on by tens of millions of Americans.

    Trump on Wednesday night cast the legislation as a victory over Democrats, calling it “a clear message that we will never give in to extortion, because that’s what it was, they tried to extort.”

    “They didn’t want to do it the easy way,” he said from the Oval Office, attacking what he called “the extremists” in the Democratic Party. “They had to do it the hard way, and they look very bad.”

    The White House signing ceremony was attended by a range of Republican lawmakers and capped a four-day sprint to pass the funding bill, after eight Senate Democrats broke ranks to compromise with Republicans amid worries about the shutdown’s widening economic consequences.

    The deal guarantees an early December vote in the Senate on the expiring Obamacare subsidies that Democrats made the focus of their demands during the shutdown fight. But a vote to extend the subsidies is unlikely to succeed, a likelihood that’s driven intense blowback across the Democratic Party.

    Most congressional Democrats loudly protested the bill in the run-up to Wednesday’s vote over concerns Americans’ health care premiums will skyrocket without the subsidies, with only six House Democrats voting in favor of the package.

    “This fight is not over. We’re just getting started,” top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries said ahead of the vote. “Tens of millions of Americans are at risk of being unable to afford to go see a doctor when they need it.”

    Back in Washington for the first time since mid-September, Speaker Mike Johnson corralled almost all Republicans behind the bill, despite sharp complaints from some of his members over a contentious provision added by Senate Republicans that allowed senators to retroactively sue the Department of Justice for obtaining phone records during a Biden-era probe – potentially amounting to a major financial windfall for those lawmakers.

    Johnson himself said he was blindsided by the language, and he said he didn’t know about it until the Senate had already passed the package.

    “I was shocked by it, I was angry about it,” the speaker said, though he added that he did not believe Senate Majority Leader John Thune added it in a nefarious manner. “I think it was a really bad look, and we’re going to fix it in the House.”

    To win over conservative holdouts, Johnson vowed that the House would take a future vote to strip that language — though it’s unclear if the Senate would take it up. Republicans like Rep. Chip Roy of Texas ultimately agreed not to amend the language in the current stopgap bill, since it would require the Senate to return to Washington to vote again and delay the end of the shutdown.

    Conservatives like Roy had blasted that provision as “self-dealing,” since it would award senators $500,000 or more in damages for each violation by the government if their lawsuit is successful. The amendment appeared to benefit eight senators in particular who had been subpoenaed by the previous administration into investigations into Trump’s first term.

    Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations panel, accused those eight senators of voting “to shove taxpayer dollars into their own pockets – $500,000 for each time their records were inspected.”

    The House Democrats who voted in favor of the compromise bill to reopen the government were: Reps. Jared Golden, Adam Gray, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Henry Cuellar, Tom Suozzi and Don Davis. GOP Reps. Thomas Massie voted and Greg Steube against the bill.

    The end of the government shutdown will usher in a frenetic few weeks of work for the House, which has been largely shuttered since late September. As part of the GOP’s pressure campaign on Democrats, Johnson had decided to keep all members out of Washington until Senate Democrats agreed to back the GOP’s existing funding plan.

    Now, Republicans and Democrats have just four weeks in session before the end of the year — when those Obamacare tax credits expire. Trump has called for revamping the law rather than extending the existing subsidies, setting up a high-stakes showdown over health care that could carry political ramifications for next year’s midterm elections.

    “Obamacare was a disaster,” Trump said Wednesday night. “We’ll work on something having to do with health care. We can do a lot better.”

    But there are plenty of other deadlines, including Congress’ farm bill and a slew of expiring energy credits.

    House Republicans are also eager to pass as many spending bills as possible to improve their negotiating stance with the Senate ahead of that next deadline on January 30.

    Johnson also faces another hot-button issue: the question of how Congress should handle the Jeffrey Epstein files.

    Not long before the votes to reopen the government got underway, a newly elected Democrat — Rep. Adelita Grijalva — became the critical 218th signature to force a vote to compel the Justice Department to release all of its case files related to Epstein.

    Johnson announced to reporters soon after Grijalva signed the petition that he will put a bill compelling the Department of Justice to release all of its Epstein case files on the House floor next week – earlier than expected, and after an extraordinary White House pressure campaign earlier Wednesday failed to convince any Republicans to remove their name from the petition.

    The effort coincided with intensifying scrutiny over the Epstein files in the House. Earlier Wednesday, House Democrats on the Oversight panel released new emails that showed Epstein had repeatedly mentioned Trump by name in private correspondence, and then the GOP-led committee released 200,000 pages of documents the panel received from Epstein’s estate.

    This headline and story have been updated with additional details.

    Sarah Ferris and CNN

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  • What Tom Suozzi’s Win Means for Democrats

    What Tom Suozzi’s Win Means for Democrats

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    Tom Suozzi’s victory in yesterday’s special House election on Long Island brings Democrats one seat closer to recapturing the majority they lost two years ago. But in the run-up to Election Day, party leaders were leery about making too much of the closely watched contest—win or lose.

    “This is a local race,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told me when I asked what a Suozzi win would say about the Democrats’ chances in November. Jeffries had just finished rallying a crowd of a few hundred health-care workers on the first day of early voting. The Brooklyn Democrat stands to become House speaker if the party can pick up another four seats later this year. His very presence in Suozzi’s district belied his attempt to downplay its significance.

    This was as national as a contest for a single House seat gets. Democrats poured millions of dollars into the compressed campaign brought about by the expulsion in December of Representative George Santos, the Republican who’d won this swing seat after selling voters on an invented life story. The election became a test case for the political salience of the GOP’s attacks on President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration and the influx of migrants over the southern border. Suozzi’s opponent, Mazi Pilip, used nearly all her campaign ads to tie him to Biden’s border policies. Suozzi, meanwhile, took a firmer stance on the border than many Democrats and assailed Mazi for opposing the bipartisan deal that Senate Republicans killed last week.

    Suozzi’s message prevailed, and his victory could offer Democrats, including the beleaguered president, a road map for rebutting Republicans on immigration in battleground states and suburban districts this fall. Notably, Suozzi broke with Democrats who have waved off voter concerns about the border as a GOP-manufactured crisis; he called for higher spending to fortify the border and urged the deportation of migrants accused of assaulting New York City police officers.

    Read: The special election that could give Democrats hope for November

    Yesterday’s election drew outsize attention not only because it involved Santos’s old seat, but also because New York’s Third District is one Democrats will need if they want any hope of regaining the House majority. Biden carried the district by eight points in the 2020 election, but Santos won it by seven two years later. With about 93 percent of the votes counted last night, Suozzi was winning by nearly eight points.

    His win narrows a Republican majority in the House, which has already been nearly impossible for Speaker Mike Johnson to govern. In a signal of just how vital the contest was, the House impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alexander Mayorkas by a single vote hours before the New York polls closed. Had Republicans waited even a day longer, Suozzi’s vote might have saved Mayorkas the indignity. (His job is almost certainly safe; the Democratic-led Senate is expected to acquit him.)

    Political prognosticators frequently warn against reading too much into special elections, which usually attract low turnout and have a mixed track record of predicting future contests. And this race was even more special than most: A snowstorm that dampened turnout made drawing national conclusions more difficult. As usual, Democratic voters were more likely than Republicans to vote early or by mail, leaving the GOP reliant on voters braving the weather on Election Day.

    The election pitted two competing dynamics against each other. Democrats have recently overperformed in off-year and special elections across the country, benefiting from a political base of higher-educated, higher-income suburban voters who are more likely to turn out for lower-profile campaigns. But Republicans have bucked that trend on Long Island, capturing virtually all of the area’s congressional seats and local offices since 2020. Central to that comeback has been the resurgence of the Nassau County GOP, which for decades was known as one of the nation’s most formidable political machines. “We took the wind out of their sails for years,” Suozzi told me when I interviewed him recently, “but they’re back to being the strongest Republican machine in New York State.”

    Suozzi has been a fixture in the district for the past three decades. A former Nassau county executive, he held the House seat for three terms before giving it up to mount an unsuccessful bid for governor in 2022. Then came Santos. In Pilip, Republicans picked as their nominee a little-known county legislator who ran a cautious campaign aimed at minimizing mistakes that could cost her votes. She agreed to just one debate a few days before the election, and when the Nassau County Republicans held their biggest rally of the campaign in late January, they scheduled it for a Saturday, when Pilip, who observes the Jewish Sabbath, could not attend.

    Suozzi made himself far more accessible both to reporters and to voters, and he tried to define Pilip from the outset of the race as an extremist who would vote for a national abortion ban. With help from national Democratic campaign committees, Suozzi ran a huge number of negative ads about Pilip. The bombardment demonstrated that he wasn’t taking the race for granted. But it also carried the risk of giving Pilip visibility she wasn’t earning for herself. “She was basically unknown outside of Great Neck, which is a small area,” former Representative Peter King, a Republican who backed Pilip, told me. “Yet he was putting her picture up all over, and her name, And it’s an unusual name, so you remember.”

    The strategy reflected Suozzi’s belief that regaining the seat would be tougher than most political observers assumed. Sure, Biden had carried the district easily in 2020 and voters likely regretted electing a GOP con artist two years later. But Democrats discovered last fall that Santos’s election did not seem to hurt other Republican candidates in local races on Long Island. And they knew that tying Pilip to Donald Trump, who remains popular in many parts of Long Island, would not be a sufficient tactic.

    In the final weeks Suozzi leaned into his record as a bipartisan dealmaker, distancing himself from Biden while touting his work in helping found the Problem Solvers Caucus in the House. Polls had given him a slim but not insurmountable lead. By the time the race was called last night, Suozzi’s initial reaction was simply relief. “Thank God,” he said with a long exhale as he addressed his supporters. Suozzi was speaking for himself after a campaign filled with bitter attacks, but he might as well have been speaking for his party, too.

    Russell Berman

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