National Democratic leaders vowed on Wednesday to take their message to the American people that the blame for the shutdown crisis lies solely with Donald Trump and the Republicans and their attacks on healthcare provisions, as the US entered the first government shutdown in almost seven years. Republicans squarely blamed their political opponents.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the US Senate, said that his party would fight on several fronts including “TV stations, social media, in picketing, in protesting, every way” to drive the party’s point home. In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe TV show on Wednesday, he said: “We’re going to say, ‘Go tell Trump he’s the one doing it.’ That’s our plan.”
As the blame game intensified on Capitol Hill, Schumer accused the Republicans of blatantly lying with their talking point that Democrats had shut down the government in order to extend healthcare benefits to undocumented immigrants. Noncitizens are barred from federal healthcare programs.
Related: What does a government shutdown mean and why is this year’s more serious?
“That’s an effing lie,” Schumer said. “They are afraid of the truth – they know that what they have done has decimated healthcare for 20 million Americans.”
Later on Wednesday morning, Republican congressional leaders gathered outside in Washington DC for a press conference to continue hammering home exactly that point.
The speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, said: “Democrats could have worked with us. Instead they prioritized taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens.”
Johnson, a Louisiana congressman, said the situation had been “entirely avoidable” and warned: “The longer this goes on the more pain will be inflicted, because it is inevitable when the government shuts down.”
He accused the Democrats of encouraging the shutdown to “satisfy their far-left base”.
The Senate majority leader, John Thune, signaled his goal was to wear Democrats down and pick them off one by one as he holds another vote on Wednesday morning on a bill that would fund the government mostly at current levels.
“We are one just one Senate roll call vote away from ending the shutdown,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said in a speech in the chamber. “We need a handful of Democrats to join Republicans to reopen the government.”
Schumer, the senior senator for New York, remains in a tight spot as he stands in the middle of a tug-of-war between wings of his party. Three members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate broke ranks and voted with the Republicans.
From the other direction, progressive Democrats are pushing Schumer to stand resolute to reflect many voters’ thirst for strong resistance to the extremes of the second Trump administration. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive Democratic representative from New York, told MSNBC that holding the line over healthcare would act as a brake on all Trump’s extremist ambitions.
“We have to stop enabling their abuse of power. When we’re fighting on healthcare, it forces them to act in accordance with the law in other ways too … They want us to blink first, and we have too much to save,” she said.
Other prominent Democrats pressed the message that the buck stopped with the US president. Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in last November’s presidential election, posted on X 10 minutes after the shutdown began at midnight that “President Trump and Congressional Republicans just shut down the government because they refused to stop your health care costs from rising”.
She added: “Let me be clear: Republicans are in charge of the White House, House, and Senate. This is their shutdown.”
Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, put out a video at midnight in which he said the cause of the shutdown was because “Republicans refuse to work with us to deal with the healthcare crisis they have created.”
Trade unions representing federal workers called for a rapid end to the shutdown, amid fears that the Trump administration will use the crisis as an opportunity to fire additional government employees. Trump has threatened to lay off “a lot of people”, adding: “They’re gonna be Democrats.”
An alliance of unions, including the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), is suing the administration in federal court in San Francisco over the threatened layoffs. “Our message is clear: fund the government, fix the healthcare crisis and put working people first,” the AFL-CIO said after the shutdown kicked in.
Markets reacted nervously. US stock markets slipped in premarket trading, with the S&P 500 down about half a percentage point.
Stock futures were also falling, and the dollar weakened early on Wednesday, indicating anxieties over the impact on the wider economy.
