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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that he hasn’t heard from the White House since a Monday meeting with President Trump and other congressional leaders.
“We haven’t heard from the White House since the White House meeting on Monday. The president has been behaving, you know, somewhat erratically and in [an] unconventional fashion in the context of the government shutting down,” Jeffries told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead.”
“Clearly, they wanted to shut the government down, unfortunately,” he added. “We’re ready to work together to bring it back open, but to do it in a way where we enact a spending agreement that’s bipartisan, that meets the needs of the American people, while at the same time addresses the Republican health care crisis that is devastating everyday Americans all across the country.”
On Monday, congressional leaders left a meeting with Trump, saying they hadn’t made progress toward a deal that would prevent a government shutdown later in the week.
The federal government formally went into a shutdown at midnight Wednesday in the wake of congressional leaders being unable to come to a deal on a stopgap spending bill, leaving lawmakers struggling over how to move forward.
The shutdown became set in stone following lawmakers voting down two stopgap funding packages, with one being a “clean” bill from Republicans and the other containing Democratic priorities.
The White House is welcoming the fight over the government shutdown, seeing it as a political loser for Democrats and a way to unilaterally push forward its own policy interests.
“The Trump Administration wants a straightforward and clean CR to continue funding the government – the exact same proposal that Democrats supported just 6 months ago, 13 times under the Biden Administration,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in an email to The Hill.
Updated at 10:41 p.m. EDT
