Congressman Latimer: ending government shutdown depends on GOP willingness to negotiate
By BY Peter Katz, Westfair’s Westchester County Business Journal
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White Plains, NY (westfaironline.com) — “We don’t know if we’re in for a long haul or not,” Congressman George Latimer, a Democrat whose New York 16th Congressional District covers parts of Westchester and the Bronx, told Westfair’s Westchester Business Journal about the government shutdown, which goes into its sixth day on Oct. 6. “There was a 35-day shutdown a number of years ago during the first Trump administration.”
He said that so far most of what has been coming from the administration during the shutdown has been aimed at hurting Democratic-controlled states such as when White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought cut billions of dollars in funding for federal programs for them, including $18 billion for two infrastructure projects in New York.
“The administration is going to tell blue (Democrat-controlled) states that things that you might have expected to happen are not going to happen during the shutdown as a way to pressure blue state senators to go along with the Republican plan for a stopgap spending measure,” Latimer said. “This administration has been breaking all sorts of traditional norms. No past Republican or past Democratic president has ever gone in the direction that the Trump folks are. It was laid out in Project 2025.”
Vought was a chief architect of Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation book that contains detailed plans for fundamentally changing the U.S. government and democracy.
Latimer said that the position that the Democrats have taken is very simple and straightforward.
“The Republicans have not needed Democratic votes in things they have done up to now but in this particular case they need Democratic votes in the Senate in order to accomplish what they want,” Latimer said. “The Democratic demand is very simple: sit down and negotiate with us. We have some issues that we want to see changes on in the health care area. The Republicans are taking their orders directly from Donald Trump: ‘do not negotiate.'”
Latimer explained that the Democrats want to undo changes made by Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ that will result in millions of Americans either losing health care insurance or seeing the premiums that they pay for the Affordable Care Act insurance just about double, meaning millions will no longer be able to afford it.
“The history of the Congress has been negotiations between the two parties,” Latimer said. “What the Democrats are saying is ‘sit down, negotiate with us, try to get to a place where we can have a bipartisan agreement of what would keep the government going forward.’ Right now the Republicans are saying ‘no, we want it this way, our way, the only way, that’s it.'”
Latimer said that despite claims from the GOP, they do not have a mandate for what is being done under the Trump administration.
“They won the House by the thinnest of margins — they actually lost a net seat — and they have the Senate by well under the 60-vote threshold and yet they want to dictate as if they had gotten a tremendous mandate,” Latimer said. “They didn’t get a mandate. They have control but that control is leavened in a system of checks and balances. Since when do all the checks and balances fall aside? Since when do we say that if you win by 2%, as Trump did, you can now drive the direction of the country 100% your way when you know that about half of the country is not with you on it.”
Latimer noted that many people in the New York area have seen Donald Trump in action for decades as a real estate developer, TV personality and in newspaper gossip columns.
“This is how he is. This is how he handled his business dealings,” Latimer said. “He wants absolute power and the Republicans in Congress, I think, are afraid of him because he threatens them with primaries so publicly. He said openly at the Charlie Kirk memorial that he hates his enemies and he’s going to get them. When he spoke at the United Nations he was very clear in the way he talked to the other nations of the world; he talked down to them, insultingly. This is how he’s operating now in the shutdown by canceling projects and withholding projects for New York and California. This is who he is.”
Latimer emphasized that Democrats as a group are willing to sit down and discuss what a continuation of government operations would look like with some concessions and the Republicans have to make some concessions but they want to make no concessions.
“If they don’t make any concessions and at the end of the day get their way people are going to get hurt,” Latimer, who previously served as Westchester County Executive, said. “You’re going to watch country property taxes all across the state go up, not just in Democratic counties, but in Republican counties as well. There are going to be big jumps in property taxes. Why? Because of what the federal government has done to cut funding to counties.”
Latimer said that the Republicans believe they can put terrible policies into effect and market their way out of being blamed for anything by convincing people that an apple is a banana.
“They’ve asserted that Medicaid is funding illegal aliens,” Latimer said. “It does not happen. We don’t give direct aid to people who are undocumented. But, they say it and they say it over and over again and I have people coming up to me and asserting that it’s true because they’ve heard it repeatedly. Their game isn’t to solve the problem. The game is to blame the other guys. The shutdown is just one skirmish in a much bigger battle to change America.”
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Peter Katzpkatz@westfairinc.com