At the calendar flipped from September to October, the US government found itself shut down. National parks are closed, US troops won’t receive paychecks, and thousands of federal employees are facing furlough. Many people feel the shutdown could have been avoided, if Democrats had been willing to accept a stopgap funding bill, as has been done several times in the past, but not this time. US Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY 11) is among the critics who believe the shutdown is all a ploy to benefit the re-election chances of one man. She appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning supporting the charge that Senator Chuck Schumer pushed hard for the shutdown in response to blowback he received from the far-left element of his own party.
“And in the process, he’s showing the country that he doesn’t have the strength to take on AOC,” Malliotakis told host Larry Mendte. “But the worst part of this all is that he claims that Democrats did not have ‘an iota of input’- those were his words. Yet, this is the exact same bill that he negotiated last year. He voted for it four times. That is, I think, what people don’t recognize, that he’s playing a real political game here and it’s wrong.”
Malliotakis feels the strategy will backfire on Democrats because it gives President Trump greater say in cutting the programs they support. “What they’re doing, in a way, is actually giving President Trump more power. They say the reason why they had to go shut down is because they were standing up to the administration, they were trying to hold him accountable. But what they’ve done, in realty, is actually give the President unilateral say right now on these funding things.”
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