Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse did not support the MAGA continuing resolution that kept the government open, but has spoken out about why some of his fellow Democratic senators voted to allow it to pass.
Sen. Whitehouse on Sunday went on ABC’s “This Week” to speak with Martha Raddatz about the extent of the damage Republicans could do in a government shutdown.
“The key to the shutdown here is that in an ordinary world, the executive branch wants to get out of the shutdown, wants to go back into normal operations,” he said. “With these MAGA extremists in charge, they don’t necessarily want to come out of shutdown.”
Whitehouse explained that the OMB would have gotten extra power to restructure the government if there were a shutdown: “There’s a guy over at the Office of Management and Budget named Russell Vought. He’s got a little sidekick over there named Mark Paoletta.”
“These are very extreme people and OMB gets wild powers during a shutdown. So what we’d be doing is probably voting first to bring the Department of Defense back out, then voting to bring Homeland Security back out, then voting to bring veterans back out — while they went through other agencies of government they don’t like so much and said that this part of the agency, that part of the agency, is unessential and, therefore, we’re going to reduce in force all the employees. We’re going to remove it, stop funding it, shut it down and then you get a very, very different government.”
Whitehouse added that Trump owns the chaos in the government which is moving a good economy into a recession.
While voting for a continuing resolution left some in the party outraged, Whitehouse wants Democrats to get back on the same page.
“My view is that as Democrats, we need to stop the intramural quarreling about who voted what way and get back to work saving our democracy,” he told Raddatz.
