Sen. Whitehouse: Republicans ‘Wanted to Force’ Dems to Choose Between Supporting a CR to Fund the Federal Gov’t or Endure More Cuts to It

EXCERPT:

WHITEHOUSE: “Well, we in a normal world would have had three options. One would be shut down the government. One would be this really awful deformation, I would call it, of a CR And the third would be continue with a short-term clean CR, conclude the nearly concluded agreement between Republicans and Democrats on appropriations numbers, and go back to regular order and bipartisan appropriations. That would ordinarily -- that third choice would have ordinarily been the way we went. But the Republicans refused to allow it because they wanted to force us to choose between the CR and the shutdown.”