With day 34 of America’s longest government shutdown having come and gone, federal workers are set to miss their second paycheck, effectively putting many of them in a pretty bad bind. But on Wednesday and Thursday, GOP lawmakers in the House looked to ease their suffering by trying to get measures passed that would allow furloughed workers to be paid without re-opening the government. It was a good faith attempt that was shot down by Democrats and was ignored by the liberal broadcast networks.
As the Washington Examiner reported Wednesday afternoon, the GOP still managed to get 10 Dems to support it even though the Democratic majority shot down the measure. “Ten House Democrats voted with Republicans in favor of a motion to scrap a Democratic bill to fully fund the government and instead make sure federal workers are paid as the shutdown continues,” The Examiner’s Pete Kasperowicz.
“The GOP motion failed 200-215, and these sorts of last-minute motions fail every time,” he added. “But winning more than 10 votes from the other side of the aisle could be a sign that Democrats are increasingly looking for a way out of the shutdown, which is hurting federal workers with each passing week.”
And as Townhall’s Guy Benson wrote on Thursday, this was not the first time House Republicans had tried the maneuver and they have been increasing their Democratic support. In Thursday’s attempt, Republicans managed to pull 13 Democrats over. Wednesday’s attempt garnered them 10, while they only had six the first time.
Both days, the liberal broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) pretended like those votes never even happened. Instead, they hyped Speaker Pelosi’s “power moves” over blocking the State of the Union address, and bemoaned the harm being done to federal workers by a dug-in President Trump. The video above shows a sampling of their shutdown coverage.
During Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News, White House correspondent Peter Alexander highlighted the unpaid federal workers that converged on Capitol Hill and the few that were arrested outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office.
“Today, fed up furloughed workers clogging the halls of the capitol. FBI agents are warning the shutdown could make us less safe,” fear-mongered ABC congressional/anti-GOP correspondent Mary Bruce on Wednesday’s World News Tonight.
The only bills the networks were interested in Thursday morning were the “dueling” Senate bills they knew would fail.
“The Senate will vote today on two competing proposals: a Republican bill that would give the President his $5.7 billion in border wall funding, and a Democratic proposal that would reopen the government through February 8th, but with no wall money,” reported congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes on CBS This Morning.
Come Thursday evening, the networks were warning the shutdown was “creating a safety risk” by putting extra stress on the nation’s air traffic controllers. “With many controllers waiting tables or driving for Uber after their normal 10-hour, six-day-a-week job,” reported NBC’s Tom Costello. “Already some controllers have resigned, citing “failure to provide wages’, ‘failure to provide compensation for travel’, ‘undue stress to me and my family.’”
Throughout the government shutdown, the networks followed families as their situations grew worse as the days went by, with some having to utilize food banks. Those were situations would end if the Democrats would’ve just voted to pay them. But the liberal networks clearly don’t want to hold stubborn Democrats to account.
