Tell your Senators: No Surrender to Republican Blackmail!
Call BOTH of your Senators.
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Call Script
My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.
Republican obstruction of the appropriation process is a form of economic terrorism and blackmail designed to ram through their extreme right-wing agenda regardless of what voters want. History teaches us that giving in to terrorists and paying off blackmailers inevitably leads to more terrorism and more blackmail. Do not surrender. Do not give in to them.
No Republican “poison pills” in any Continuing Resolution (CR), such as the Hyde Amendment, defense-domestic spending parity limits, or any kind of prohibition against public health emergency measures such as vaccine mandates.
Do not allow Republicans to separate out and pass the three appropriation bills they love — Defense, Homeland Security, and Agriculture subsidies — without passing the other nine.
Reduce total defense spending and redirect those funds to defending us from the real and immediate climate emergency threats that we are facing and suffering from right now
Background
So long as the 2022 appropriation bills are blocked in the Senate, the government continues to be funded by short-term Continuing Resolutions (CRs), which essentially allow each department and agency to spend money according to the limits and provisions of the last appropriation bill that was enacted. Ever since President Biden was inaugurated, the federal government has been operating on, and restricted to, the limits and provisions of appropriation bills passed during the last year of the Trump regime. This means the government cannot start or expand new and desperately needed programs to address climate change, economic justice, health care, and other urgent issues.
Republicans like this state of affairs because ever since the Reagan era, they have viewed government as "the problem, not the solution." But there are three areas of government they do care about: defense, policing, and agricultural subsidies. Which means that for them, Defense, Homeland Security, and Agriculture subsidy appropriations are "must pass." If Republicans can pass those three (with the help of corporate Democrats), there's no incentive for them to pass any of the others. So they may try to separate out and pass those three bills as stand-alones, or as a defense-homeland-agriculture mini-omnibus bill. That would be similar to the way they plucked the corporate-friendly infrastructure provisions from Biden's original economic proposals and passed them as a “bipartisan” infrastructure bill and then blocked the rest of the agenda, including climate defense, health care, restoration of tax cuts, child credits, and so on. If the Democratic leadership allows a repeat, they surrender their only leverage to force Republicans to the negotiating table on the remaining appropriation bills.
References
House passes stopgap bill to prevent shutdown, The Hill, 2/8/22
Short-term government funding bill introduced, The Hill, 2/7/22
Stopgap funding bill introduced to buy more negotiating time, Roll Call, 2/7/22
House to take up stop-gap funding bill to avoid government shutdown, The Hill 2/6/22
The Congressional Appropriations Process: An Introduction, Congressional Research Service (CRS)