The disconnect between Congressional Democrats and the Trump administration could soon again have far-reaching consequences for how the federal government pays its bills — or not. As deadlines for approving more government spending and increasing the debt ceiling quickly approach, The Washington Post has outlined just how far off House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has seemed to go from the White House and their demands. Reportedly, during a meeting just last month she even admonished acting White House budget director Russell Vought during a meeting, asking after he interjected:
‘What was your name again, dear?’
Pelosi has more directly dismissed a number of other officials from the ever-belligerent Trump administration as budget negotiations — or at least, the need for budget negotiations drags on and on. She has asserted that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has “no credibility” in any financial discussions since while serving on the Trump team, he has previously pushed for a government shutdown over coming to a compromise with Democrats about future government spending.
She has also now repeatedly confronted President Donald Trump himself. During an interview with Fox News undertaken during his recent trip to France for a commemoration of the Allies’ D-Day invasion during World War II, Trump — literally with the graves of fallen soldiers behind him — asserted that Pelosi is a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person.” He’s gone to similar extremes plenty of times before, asserting after a meeting over a potential infrastructure package fell through that Pelosi has experienced diminished mental capacity.
To be clear, she’s not the one who recently said that the kidney has a very important function in the heart — that’s Trump. Pelosi, for her part, asserted following Trump’s France spectacle:
‘I’m done with him.’
About possible continued interactions between her side and the White House, Pelosi shared just this Tuesday:
‘I don’t see any reason to have a meeting. They know where we are. We’ve met, we’ve met, we’ve met.’
Ironically enough — although considering the realities of government, this isn’t exactly feasible — Trump himself pronounced after storming out of a meeting with Pelosi earlier this year that his team would not be working with the Democrats on any more bipartisan legislation pushes at all until they stopped their Constitutionally mandated oversight and investigation of his administration. They have most definitely not done so, with the House Judiciary Committee approving subpoenas targeting high-profile individuals like Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner just this week.
These issues are unfolding against the backdrop of continued potentially soon crippling financial issues for the federal government. Suddenly, it’s come out that the Treasury Department could run out of cash sooner than expected and the deadline for increasing the debt ceiling so the government can keep paying its bills has subsequently been pushed up. Concurrently, Congress still has to approve more spending for the government in the first place past September, and one of the last times this came up, parts of the federal government were closed for more than a month because of an inability to find common ground between Republican and Democratic plans for government spending.
Featured Image via screenshot
