Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said Thursday the upcoming votes on appropriations bills are “show votes” that would take money from military service members to pay for a border wall.
While the House voted on formalizing certain aspects of its impeachment inquiry, the New York Democrat decried the pair of appropriations packages the Senate is considering on Thursday. A cloture vote on the second of the packages, which includes funding for the Departments of Defense State, and other foreign operations, is expected in the Senate for Thursday afternoon.
“Democrats will not proceed to a bill that steals money from our troops and their families,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor. “This is just a show vote. [Senate Majority] Leader [Mitch] McConnell got on the floor a few weeks ago and railed against show votes. … I understand that memories in politics [are] short, but the exercise we will go through this afternoon is absurd.”
Mr. Schumer said if President Trump were “truly a champion of working Americans,” then he and his fellow Republicans would roll up their sleeves to come to a bipartisan solution to the spending impasse.
Mr. McConnell said earlier on Thursday morning that the Democrats’ effort to slow-walk funding was tantamount to “political gymnastics at an Olympic level.”
Existing funding for the government expires next month before the Thanksgiving holiday, with the prospect of a government shutdown fight arriving a month earlier than last year.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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