Schumer says Democrats will not support ‘partisan’ funding bill passed by House Republicans to avert shutdown
Speaking on the Senate floor, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority’s leader, said this afternoon that Democrats will not provide the necessary votes to adopt the stopgap funding bill passed by House Republicans, which includes cuts to vital services and programs.
Senate rules mean that 60 votes are needed to move legislation forward, and Republicans only have 53 seats – and 52 votes, given Rand Paul’s stated opposition to to the House bill.
Here are Schumer’s remarks:
Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort. But Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their Continuing Resolution without any input, any input, from Congressional Democrats.
Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR.
Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11th CR that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass. We should vote on that.
I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday.
Key events
Lauren Gambino
House Democrats rallied around the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s call for a short-term extension of government funding on Wednesday.
“We strongly support a four-week continuing resolution that keeps the government open and allows Congress the time to reach a final agreement that meets the needs of the American people. House Republicans should get back to Washington immediately so that we can take up a short-term measure, pass it on a bipartisan basis and avoid a Trump-inspired government shutdown,” Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader, said in a joint statement with other House Democratic leaders.
“The highly partisan House Republican spending bill will hurt everyday Americans by callously cutting healthcare, nutritional assistance and veterans benefits. It is a complete nonstarter,” it said.
Trump administration clears immigrants from Guantánamo detention center
Before the courts could weigh in on the legality of Donald Trump’s showy, and expensive, campaign to scare potential immigrants from coming to the United States, by sending people awaiting deportation to the American military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, his administration abruptly cleared out the last people being held there this week.
Two US defense officials told Voice of America on Wednesday that 40 detainees, including 23 termed “high-threat illegal aliens”, were flown from the base to Louisiana on Tuesday.
The officials, who insisted on anonymity, told the US government-owned broadcaster that the detainees had been flown aboard a non-military aircraft at the direction of officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Trump has moved to take greater control over the previously non-partisan Voice of America and installed Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor who narrowly failed to win election as Arizona’s governor in 2020, as a special adviser to the agency that oversees it.
In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump signaled his contempt for VOA’s journalism by brushing off a question from Patsy Widakuswara, the broadcaster’s White House bureau chief.
When Widakuswara asked the Irish premier, Micheál Martin: “What about the president’s plan to expel Palestinians out of Gaza? Are you discussing that with him and giving him your opinion?” Trump interrupted to say: “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians. Who are you with?” Widakuswara answered: “I’m with Voice of America, sir.” Trump replied: “Oh, no wonder” and ended the exchange by calling on another reporter to ask a question more to his liking.
George Joseph
Federal prosecutors have sent a criminal subpoena to a Manhattan hotel housing undocumented immigrants through a New York City program providing shelter to asylum seekers, according to a copy of the filing obtained by the Guardian.
The subpoena issued on Wednesday asks the hotel to provide “a list of full names of aliens currently residing” at the site as well as “any corresponding identifying information”, including dates of birth, nationality and identification numbers. The subpoena also asks the hotel to give evidence about “an alleged violation” of federal immigration law.
A source shared the document on the condition that the Guardian not share the name of their employer because the hotel is now part of a federal criminal investigation.
Federal judge grants discovery to 14 states seeking to identify Doge employees and extent of Elon Musk’s authority
US district judge Tanya Chutkan has granted a request by 14 state attorneys general for discovery in a suit against Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) service.
Chutkan’s order says that the permitted discovery includes documents related to the “parameters of Doge’s and Musk’s authority”, and the identities of Doge personnel.
The suit argues that Musk’s role, and the apparent power of Doge to make sweeping changes to federal agencies, violates the constitution’s appointments clause, which specifies that people who exercise “significant authority” on behalf of the United States must be nominated by the president and confirmed subject to the advice and consent of the Senate.
Trump is also a named defendant in the suit, but the plaintiffs agreed not to seek information from the president, or ask to depose him or Musk.
Far-right commentators complained loudly about the ruling, with one, Nick Sortor, falsely claiming that the judge “has now ORDERED the doxing of DOGE employees”.
Sortor was one of several rightwing influencers to post photographs of Chutkan on social media, which could make the judge a target for aggrieved Trump or Musk fans.
He added the following all-caps encouragement to Musk and one of his young staffers, who is better known by the online nickname he gave himself: “DO NOT RELENT! THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HAVE YOUR BACK, ELON AND BIG BALLS!”
On social media, Republicans try to frame Schumer for shutdown
Rather than negotiate with Democrats to reach a bipartisan agreement to fund the government before Friday’s deadline, Republicans appear to have settled on a social media strategy of just blaming a shutdown on Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats.
On X, the platform owned by Elon Musk, the president’s most powerful adviser, the White House’s deeply partisan “rapid response” account posted: “SCHUMER SHUTDOWN: Democrats are bent on shutting the government down.”
The Republicans, having passed a House bill that makes cuts Democrats find unacceptable, now need at least eight Democrats to vote with them for any stopgap funding measure, since 60 votes are required; there are only 53 Republican senators, and one of them, Rand Paul, has said he is “a hell no!” on the bill.
On the Senate floor earlier on Wednesday, Schumer said: “Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort. But Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their Continuing Resolution without any input, any input, from Congressional Democrats. Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR.”
Charlie Kirk, the influential podcaster and founder and chief of the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA, posted a video clip of Schumer’s speech with the caption: “Chuck Schumer now owns the shutdown.” But the edited clip Kirk shared left out the end of Schumer’s remarks, which was a call to negotiate: “I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday.”
“Charlie is right,” the senator Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican, replied. He added: “President Trump doesn’t want a shutdown. But if we do, Senate Democrats will 100% own it.”
That talking point was echoed by the senator Pete Ricketts, a Nebraska Republican, who wrote: “If the government shuts down, it is because of Chuck Schumer and the Democrats”.
Oliver Milman
Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the US government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.
The so-called endangerment finding, which followed a supreme court ruling that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases, provides the underpinning for all rules aimed at cutting the pollution that scientists have unequivocally found is worsening the climate crisis.
Despite the enormous and growing body of evidence of devastation caused by rising emissions, including trillions of dollars in economic costs, Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and dismissed those concerned by its worsening impacts as “climate lunatics”.
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency would reconsider the endangerment finding due to concerns that it had spawned “an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas”.
In Ireland, Marco Rubio suggests without evidence detained protester Mahmoud Khalil supports Hamas
Speaking to reporters during a refueling stop at Shannon airport in Ireland on Wednesday, the secretary of state Marco Rubio defended the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States who took part in student protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza that the Trump administration has claimed were “aligned to Hamas”.
In his remarks, which were characterized by an official White House X account as a comment on “pro-Hamas agitators”, Rubio suggested, without evidence, that the former Columbia University student is “a big supporter of Hamas” and had failed to disclose that when he first obtained a visa to study in the US, and then became a legal permanent resident.
“When you come to the United States as a visitor, which is what a visa is, which is how this individual entered this country,” Rubio said, “we can deny you that visa.”
The administration has yet to provide any evidence that Khalil supported Hamas in any way beyond the vague assertion that some pro-Hamas literature was reportedly found on the Columbia campus during the protests. Before his arrest, Khalil also told the Associated Press that the university had asked him about social media statements from other protesters about Hamas that he did not write or post.
Rubio, who has long equated peaceful protest against Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza to support for Hamas, went on to present a baseless caricature of the Palestinian activist’s politics.
“If you tell us, when you apply: ‘Hi, I’m trying to get into the United States on a student visa. I am a big supporter of Hamas,’” Rubio said, “if you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this, and if you tell us when you apply for your visa: ‘And by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities, I intend to shut down your universities,’ if you told us all these things when you apply for a visa, we would deny your visa.
“If you actually end up doing that, once you are in this country on a visa, we will revoke it. And if you end up having a green card, not citizenship but a green card, as a result of that visa … we’re going to kick you out”.
“This is not about free speech,” Rubio continued. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
“I think being a supporter of Hamas, and coming in to our universities, and turning them upside down … if you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would’ve never let you in. And if you do it once you get in, we’re going to revoke it and kick you out.”
Perhaps because he was speaking to a traveling press corps of American reporters, not the Irish media, no one followed up to ask the secretary whether such reasoning could also be used to deport any Irish-born green card holders who might ever have expressed support for the IRA.
The representative Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat, said in a statement on Wednesday that Khalil’s detention was very much about free speech.
“The Trump Administration is violating Mahmoud Khalil’s first amendment rights,” she wrote on X. “He must be allowed to speak with his attorneys privately, and his constitutional rights must be respected. The conditions and location of his detention are unacceptable.”
At a news conference in lower Manhattan, Shezza Abboushi Dallal, a staff attorney with the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (Clear) project at Cuny School of Law, read a statement from Mahmoud Khalil’s wife, who does not wish to be named. The project was founded and is co-directed by Ramzi Kassem, one of Khalil’s lawyers.
Here is the complete statement:
My husband was kidnapped from our home, and it is shameful that the US government continues to hold him because he stood for the rights and lives of his people. I demand his immediate release and return to our family.
His disappearance has devastated our lives. Every day without him is filled with uncertainty – not just for me, but for our entire family and community. Our loved ones are struggling with the pain and fear of his sudden absence.
And yet, we are not alone. So many who know and love Mahmoud have come together, refusing to stay silent. Their support is a testament to his character and to the deep injustice of what is being done to him.
Schumer says Democrats will not support ‘partisan’ funding bill passed by House Republicans to avert shutdown
Speaking on the Senate floor, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority’s leader, said this afternoon that Democrats will not provide the necessary votes to adopt the stopgap funding bill passed by House Republicans, which includes cuts to vital services and programs.
Senate rules mean that 60 votes are needed to move legislation forward, and Republicans only have 53 seats – and 52 votes, given Rand Paul’s stated opposition to to the House bill.
Here are Schumer’s remarks:
Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort. But Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their Continuing Resolution without any input, any input, from Congressional Democrats.
Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR.
Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11th CR that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass. We should vote on that.
I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday.
Judge halts Trump executive order banning law firm that worked with Democrats from federal contracts
Hugo Lowell
The federal judge Beryl Howell has blocked an executive order that Donald Trump signed last week directing agencies to terminate contracts and no longer interact with Perkins Coie, a law firm that worked with Democrats during the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
Howell handed down a temporary restraining order against Trump’s executive action, which cited Perkins Coie’s involvement in the Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unverified allegations that sparked a political firestorm when it became public just before Trump’s first inauguration, but has since been discredited.
Since taking office, Trump has targeted law firms that assisted the former special counsel Jack Smith’s aborted prosecutions of him, and dismissed government lawyers who were involved in the cases. Here’s more on that:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) has condemned Donald Trump’s comment that the Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is “a Palestinian”.
“President Trump’s use of the term ‘Palestinian’ as a racial slur is offensive and beneath the dignity of his office. He should apologize to the Palestinian and American people,” said the Cair national executive director, Nihad Awad, who is of Palestinian heritage.
“It is the continuing dehumanization of the Palestinian people that has resulted in horrific hate crimes against Palestinian-Americans, the US-enabled genocide in Gaza, and decades of denial of Palestinian human rights by successive presidential administrations.”
