WASHINGTON: Four months after barely avoiding a catastrophic default, the world’s largest economy is once again on the verge of a major fiscal crisis.
President Joe Biden’s Democrats are engaged in a bitter feud with Republican rivals in Congress over spending bills, which, if not passed into law soon, may trigger a government shutdown.
US lawmakers have until midnight on Sep 30 to reach an agreement, before funding for government services is due to dry up.
A shutdown would put at risk the finances of hundreds of thousands of workers at national parks, museums and other sites operating on federal funding, but it could also carry significant political risk for Biden as he runs for re-election in 2024.
House Republicans failed to support the government spending levels agreed to between Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in Congress, that would keep government gears turning, the White House has said.
“A small group of extreme Republicans don’t want to live up to the deal, so now everyone in America could be forced to pay the price,” Biden said on Saturday (Sep 23).
“It’s time for Republicans to start doing the job America elected them to do.”
Tensions are mounting around additional aid for Kyiv after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Congress on Thursday pleading for more weapons to battle Russian forces 18 months into the war.
Both parties in the Senate support the US$24 billion aid bill. But a handful of hardline Republicans in the House of Representatives are threatening to block it.
“I am not voting for one single penny to go to a war in Ukraine,” congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a close ally of former president Donald Trump, said in a video posted on X, the former Twitter.
“I am America First, I work for the United States of America. I work for the American people.”
Fellow House Republican Eli Crane echoed that view.
“People all over the country are so tired of funding others … We continue to spend and spend and spend, money that we don’t have,” he said in a video on social media.
Such bluster is putting McCarthy in a bind.
“He’s in a very difficult position because the holdouts keep saying to Kevin McCarthy: ‘Don’t bring bipartisan bills to the floor, we don’t want you to use Democrat votes to try to avert a shutdown,'” House Republican Mike Turner told ABC News Sunday talk show This Week.
