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alex padilla
Shutdown Belongs to GOP, Say Dems, After Trump Responds to Talks With 'Racist AI Video'
Republicans, said one Democratic lawmaker, "would rather see the government shut down than negotiate a bipartisan deal to save your healthcare, to keep the government open, and to keep federal workers working, which is exactly why we are here.”
Sep 30, 2025
Anyone wondering "who owns" the looming government shutdown following negotiations between President Donald Trump and congressional leaders that went nowhere on Monday should "look no further" said one Democratic lawmaker, than the racist, artificial intelligence-created video posted by the president shortly after the meeting, which depicted House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries with a Mexican sombrero and fake mustache.
"Democrats came to the White House to keep the government open," said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.). "The president answered with a racist AI video."
Trump posted the video of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Jeffries, also of New York, after they emerged from the meeting, where Schumer said "large differences" remained between Democrats and Republicans over healthcare provisions in a government spending bill.
"Bigotry will get you nowhere," said Jeffries in response to Trump's posted video, before adding: "Cancel the Cuts. Lower the Cost. Save Healthcare. We are NOT backing down."
Democrats have consistently called for an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of the year and to reverse Medicaid cuts included in the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Republicans including Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) have falsely claimed the Democrats are pushing to fund "free healthcare" for undocumented immigrants in their budget proposal to keep the government funded through October.
The Democratic proposal would restore the eligibility of "lawfully present" immigrants for ACA subsidies, but would not change the fact that undocumented immigrants are not eligible for healthcare plans through the ACA or coverage through Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
In the fake video posted on Truth Social by Trump, Schumer was shown making statements he has never made about the Democrats needing to give undocumented immigrants free healthcare so they will vote for the party—which they're also not eligible to do.
Jeffries, who is Black, was also shown wearing a sombrero as mariachi music played in the background.
"This is peak Donald Trump and it’s a goddamn tragedy for our country," said Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.).
The Republicans need at least 60 votes in the Senate to pass their spending bill to keep the government funded through November 21, meaning they won't be able to pass it without at least eight Democrats joining them.
The GOP-controlled House passed the Republicans' funding extension this month, but it failed in the Senate. Johnson has adjourned the House until October 7.
On Monday, Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) posted a video on social media as she arrived at the Capitol for what had been scheduled to be a "voting day" for members of the House.
"Republicans cancelled votes and didn't show up for work tonight," said Stansbury, "because they would rather see the government shut down than negotiate a bipartisan deal to save your healthcare, to keep the government open, and to keep federal workers working, which is exactly why we are here."
Democrats have warned that up to 15 million people could lose their healthcare coverage and 24 million could see their monthly insurance premiums rise by 75%—per an analysis by KFF—under the Republican spending plan.
Schumer said that at the White House meeting Monday, he and Jeffries "laid out to the president some of the consequences of what’s happening in healthcare."
"By his face, he looked like he heard about them for the first time," said Schumer. “It’s in the president’s hands whether we avoid a shutdown or not. He has to convince the Republican leaders."
Republicans are planning to force another vote in the Senate on the House-passed funding extension on Tuesday, ahead of the midnight shutdown deadline.
The Trump administration has said it will unleash a new wave of mass firings in the federal government if the government shuts down.
On social media Monday, The New Republic posted that the "tired punditry of shutdown politics doesn't adequately illustrate Republican villainy."
"This shutdown is happening because the aforementioned party of dictatorship wants it to happen so it can destroy the federal government and vastly reduce the number of things it does for people," said the magazine. "What that means: massive layoffs in many departments and agencies, with the hope of making as many as possible permanent. The Trump White House wants to cut the State Department by 84%, the Department of Housing and Urban Development by 43%, and the Labor Department by 35%. If the government shuts down Tuesday night, it wants to furlough as many people as it can get away with. Except, of course, in two areas: immigration enforcement and defense. There, it’s party time."
Republican leaders, including Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), have claimed Democrats will be responsible for a government shutdown, saying the two parties can negotiate over healthcare after the funding extension is passed.
But, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), "Republicans are still refusing to come to the table" regarding Democrats' demands.
"They control every chamber in Congress and the White House," she said. "This shutdown is on them."
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Trump Has Dismantled Anti-Human Trafficking Programs and 'Repeatedly Sided With Sex Offenders'
"The Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to our capacity to hold sex offenders to account and undermined support and services for crime victims," said Rep. Jamie Raskin.
Sep 17, 2025
Congressional Democrats and victim advocates took aim Tuesday at President Donald Trump's gutting of federal programs combatcing human trafficking, belying campaign promises to aggressively target perpetrators of such crimes.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, on Tuesday released an 18-page memo "detailing how the Trump administration has repeatedly sided with sex offenders and human traffickers over their victims—often rewarding sexual predators and elevating them to positions of power within the US government while crippling key offices, programs, and grants that combat sex crimes and support survivors."
This seemingly flies in the face of Trump's "Agenda 47" campaign platform, which vowed to aggressively crack down on human traffickers, and the groundswell of Trump supporters' unheeded calls for action and accountability in the Jeffrey Epstein case. Fighting child sex trafficking—both real and imagined—has long been an issue of passionate importance for the MAGA movement.
"Trump began his second term promising to 'make America safe again.' But safe for whom? Law-abiding citizens or dangerous criminals?"
Noting that "Trump and his supporters have gone from demanding the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files to doing everything in their power to prevent their release, openly tampering with potential witness Ghislaine Maxwell and calling the matter a 'Democrat hoax,'" the memo—titled Epstein Is the Tip of the Iceberg—begins by asking: "Trump began his second term promising to 'make America safe again.' But safe for whom? Law-abiding citizens or dangerous criminals?"
The memo notes that in the past seven months, Trump has:
- Gutted federal offices designed to combat human trafficking, domestic violence, and sexual violence against women and children.
- Terminated the programs and grants designed to support the victims and survivors of human trafficking networks and crimes of sexual violence.
- Made it systematically harder for law enforcement to prosecute sex offenders and dismantle sex trafficking networks.
- Repeatedly used the powers of his office to pardon individual sexual predators and give official protection, aid, and comfort to accused rapists and child pornographers.
- Rewarded numerous individuals who have a personal history of sexual predation and domestic violence by appointing them to his administration and elevating them to senior positions within the government.
Senior administration officials including Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and former de facto Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief Elon Musk have been accused of either committing or enabling sexual crimes or misconduct.
Trump has also been found civilly liable for sexual abuse and has been accused of rape, sexual assault, or harassment by more than two dozen women.
"President Trump in office has repeatedly taken the side of criminal sex predators and violent abusers against their victims, and this pattern goes well beyond his strenuous efforts to bury the Epstein Files," Raskin said Tuesday in a statement. "Trump is systematically dismantling the offices and programs we rely on to combat human trafficking and prosecute sex crimes."k
"Our memo shows how the Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to our capacity to hold sex offenders to account and undermined support and services for crime victims," the congressman added. "Far from aiding victims and survivors, President Trump consistently sides with their abusers. His all-of-government policy to aid traffickers and sex criminals and abandon survivors has made American women dramatically less safe."
Following whistleblower claims "that the Trump administration concealed information about the safety of unaccompanied Guatemalan children they tried to deport in the dead of night," Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday called for an oversight hearing to examine the US Office of Refugee Resettlement's "mass child deportation efforts and apparent lies under oath."
"The urgent call for a hearing comes after the disclosure alleged that at least 30 of 327 unaccompanied Guatemalan children the administration attempted to deport without due process 'have indicators of being a victim of child abuse, including death threats, gang violence, human trafficking, and/or have expressed fear of return to Guatemala,'" Padilla's office said in a statement Wednesday.
An investigation published Wednesday by The Guardian also detailed how the Trump administration "has aggressively rolled back efforts across the federal government to combat human trafficking."
Jean Bruggeman, executive director of the advocacy group Freedom Network USA, told The Guardian that “it’s been a widespread and multipronged attack on survivors that leaves all of us less safe and leaves survivors with few options."
Numerous critics have warned of the dangers of Trump's diversion of federal resources and personnel dedicated to combating human trafficking to enforcing mass deportations.
As Raskin told Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel during a charged Wednesday hearing, "When Trump decided that rounding up immigrants with no criminal records was more important that preventing crimes like human trafficking of women and girls, drug dealing, terrorism, and fraud, you ordered FBI’s 25 largest field offices to divert thousands of agents away from chasing down violent criminals, sex traffickers, fraudsters, and scammers to help carry out Trump’s extreme immigration crackdown."
"You ordered hundreds of FBI agents to pore over all the Epstein files," Raskin said, "but not to look for more clues about the money network or the network of human traffickers, pulled these agents from their regular counterterrorism, counterintelligence, or anti-drug trafficking duties to work around the clock, some of them sleeping on their office desks, to conduct a frantic search to make sure Donald Trump’s name and image were flagged and redacted wherever they appeared."
"Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are," Raskin added.
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'Trump Is Making Your Life More Expensive': Tariff Chaos Engulfs US Economy
“Poor and working people are paying the price" of the president's tariff policies, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
Sep 16, 2025
US consumers are increasingly feeling the impact of President Donald Trump's tariffs, and the head of the Congressional Budget Office said on Monday that they are fueling inflation.
During an appearance on CNBC, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Phillip Swagel said that the president's tariffs have pushed up inflation more than the agency initially anticipated, although he emphasized that their impact on inflation so far was "not by a lot, but by enough to show" in the numbers.
Swagel also said that the higher-than-expected inflation was a surprise because there are signs that the US economy has slowed significantly since January.
CNN on Tuesday published an analysis using numbers from the Yale Budget Lab estimating that Trump's tariffs will cost US households an average of $2,300 extra per year, which is nearly three times as much as the $800 US households are projected to receive on average from new tax provisions contained in the Republicans' "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that passed earlier this year.
The combined distributional impacts of the Trump tariffs and the GOP tax law are also highly regressive. According to CNN's analysis, a household with annual earnings of $38,840 would be $2,560 worse off thanks to the tariffs and the tax law, while households earning $517,700 would be $8,180 better off.
The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that Trump's tariffs aren't just hurting Americans in the US, but those living abroad as well.
As explained by the Post, Americans living abroad have been unable to send mail to the US without paying hefty fines thanks to the chaos being caused by Trump's tariffs. The reason for this, writes the paper, is that Trump earlier this year canceled a policy known as the de minimis exemption, effective August 29, that "allowed the tariff-free flow of goods under $800 into the United States."
This has led not just to increased shipping costs for Americans living abroad, but has also resulted in foreign nations slowing or even outright halting shipments to the US because they are unsure about how to calculate the costs.
"Confusion about the rules have led to issues since the exemption was lifted on August 29," the Post wrote. "At first, national postal services in more than 30 countries temporarily suspended sending some or most US-bound packages. Since then, restrictions have eased, and the Universal Postal Union deployed a tool this week to help operators calculate duties and resume services."
Reacting to fresh revelations about the impact of the tariffs, many progressive Democrats hammered Trump for increasing the cost of living for working-class families.
"Under Donald Trump’s economy: coffee is up 26%, beef is up 14%, oranges are up 17%, bananas are up 6%, chicken is up 6%, chocolate chip cookies are up 5%, potato chips are up 4%, milk is up 4%," wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). "But average worker pay is only up 2%. Trumpflation is eating up your paycheck."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) added that “from school supplies to gas to groceries, Trump is making your life more expensive."
"Poor and working people are paying the price of his reckless policies," said the congresswoman.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, took to the Senate floor on Monday to single out a different Trump policy that he said was also raising prices for US consumers—namely, his attacks on green energy projects.
"This administration is shamelessly working to block one of our best defenses against rising energy bills: renewable energy," Padilla said. "And I say so because renewable energy is absolutely affordable, renewable energy is abundant, and whether you want to admit it or not, renewable energy sources are our future."
The senator also pointed to his home state of California as an example of what can happen when the government encourages the development of green energy projects.
"[California is] harnessing the power of solar and wind and hydroelectric power and nuclear, geothermal, even hydrogen power to our state," he said. "And it’s exactly because of those investments that even in a year like 2024, just last year, when we experienced record heatwaves that we also saw record renewable energy generation, and we kept the lights on."
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