Chris Murphy Bashes GOP For Dead Of Night Budget Vote

At 2am Thursday morning, Senate Republicans approved a budgetary claw-back because Trump and his vicious budget director Russ Vought want one.

The best description I've read of what happened was in this morning's fundraising email from Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. It's worth your time:

Something unprecedented is happening on the Senate floor tonight. Republicans are pulling off a con job, and I think you need to know about it. So let me walk you through it.

Republicans are codifying Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts into law via a rarely used rescission process. Not only does Congress rarely pass rescission bills, it has never passed a partisan rescissions bill before. Every year, Congress has to pass a budget that can get 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster — forcing the modern appropriations process to be bipartisan.

That happened in the spring. I voted against it because Republicans didn’t really negotiate with Democrats. They made a bunch of cuts to important programs, and it gave Trump more power. But enough of my Democratic colleagues felt pressured into voting for it out of fear that a government shutdown would give Trump even more power to make far more drastic cuts.

Fast forward to today. Republicans are on the cusp of enacting the first ever partisan rescissions bill. They’re doing by using s a type of legislation that has privileged consideration in the Senate and allows any cuts to the budget with just 50 votes.

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