Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume said Monday that Democrats prolonged the government shutdown not out of concern for health care benefits but to brand themselves as the opposition to President Donald Trump.
Forty days into the shutdown, eight Senate Democrats broke with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to back a GOP-led stopgap bill, giving the measure enough votes to advance and finally set the stage to reopen the government. During a panel discussion on “Special Report with Bret Baier,” Hume said prolonging the shutdown exposed what he called the Democrats’ true motivation.
“It really wasn’t about enhanced ACA (Affordable Care Act) benefits. It was about Democrats wanting to position themselves in resistance and opposition to Donald Trump in every way they could do,” Hume told Bret Baier.
Hume called the standoff a “fool’s errand,” saying that using a shutdown as leverage has never succeeded.
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“This whole shutdown was a fool’s errand from the start. This strategy has been tried a number of times before where you try to use the government shutdown and the pressure to get the government reopened as a lever to get something done you couldn’t get done by the normal process because you didn’t have the votes,” Hume said. “It has never worked. It was never going to work.”
While early polls suggested Republicans were taking more of the blame, Hume said key Democratic allies urged lawmakers to accept the GOP’s temporary funding bill. (RELATED: Mike Johnson Reveals Schumer’s Inappropriate Request During Shutdown)
“There was some polling that indicated that the Democrats were getting less of the blame than the Republicans. But remember this, key elements in the Democratic Party, American Federation of Government Employees, the Teamsters Union, the airline workers union, the pilots’ union, they were all urging that the Republican measure, the temporary measure, be passed,” Hume said. “And, of course, as the air traffic situation began to get worse and the deprivation of SNAP benefits set in, it became absolutely untenable, which, when you think about it, it really was from the start.”
Teamsters Union President Sean O’Brien and United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby urged Senate Democrats to end the shutdown and pass the GOP’s stopgap bill, saying that continued delays were punishing workers and travelers alike. O’Brien said Democrats should “pass a clean CR” and stop using working families as “collateral damage” in a political fight they had the power to end.
Americans are bearing the brunt of a shutdown that Senate Democrats have repeatedly prolonged, as flight cancellations and delays threatened to upend holiday travel plans. With the Federal Aviation Administration ordering nationwide flight reductions and unpaid air traffic controllers stretched thin, millions of travelers faced chaos just weeks before Thanksgiving.
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