Biden tears into ‘extreme’ House Republicans over looming shutdown

By Geoff Earle In Philadelphia For Dailymail.Com and Morgan Phillips, Politics Reporter For Dailymail.Com

Published: 16:41 EDT, 26 September 2023 | Updated: 16:41 EDT, 26 September 2023

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President Joe Biden once again ripped House Republicans Tuesday and warned against a government shutdown, with funding set to run out September 30th if lawmakers can’t reach a resolution.

‘In just about a week, we could be facing a government shutdown if Republicans in the House Representatives don’t do their job. There’s no reason for us to be in this position,’ he inveighed in a new video Biden released on his official account on the former Twitter site.

Biden cited his earlier talks with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, which resulted in agreement on spending levels. He warned against the potential toll on the military and on government services, as the White House prepares to try to capitalize on the prospect of chaos in the Capitol.

‘Now, there’s a small group of extreme House Republicans who don’t want to live up to that deal. So they’re determined to shut down the government – shut it down now. And it makes no sense,’ he said, speaking from the Oval Office in a video with multiple camera cuts.

Biden said he was prepared to do his part by House Republicans ‘refuse to stand up to the extremists in their party.’ In a shutdown scenario, military members would be on duty ‘but not get paid,’ Biden said, in just one of the federal impacts the White House has been rollign out this week. ‘And frankly, that’s adding insult to injury.’

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday came to the Senate floor to warn against a shutdown, after earlier observing shutdowns haven’t worked out well for Republicans in the past.

‘Over the years, I’ve been pretty clear in my view that government shutdowns are bad news whichever way you look at them,’ McConnell said.

‘They don’t work as political bargaining chips. They create unnecessary hardships for millions of Americans. For example, nearly 46,000 servicemembers and 22,000 civilian workers in my home state of Kentucky who earn federal government paychecks. And they hardly ever produce meaningful policy outcomes at the end of the day,’ he continued.

‘A government shutdown would be an unnecessary disruption of the important work on the Senate’s agenda. So I would urge each of my colleagues to work this week to avoid one.’

He spoke while on the other side of the Capitol, House Republicans struggled to find a way forward.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he would put a short-term continuing resolution (CR) on the floor to fund the government beyond September 30. But McCarthy, facing pressure from his conference, would likely include provisions to bolster border security.

‘What’s concerning to me is that there are people in the Republican Party who will take the position of President Biden against what the rest of Americans want,’ McCarthy said Tuesday. 

The speaker can only afford to lose four Republican votes and still pass a party-line CR loaded up with spending cuts.

But more than a quarter of Republicans have blasted a temporary funding bill, including Donald Trump loyalist Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

Biden’s video came a day after he dared Americans to stop electing Republicans if the government careens into shutdown next weekend.

‘Funding the government is one of the most basic, fundamental responsibilities of the Congress and if Republicans in the House don’t start doing their job, we should stop electing them,’ Biden said in remarks at the White House. 

The government will run out of money on September 30 if the House and Senate do not agree on spending legislation to send to the president’s desk.  

The president pointed to the debt ceiling deal he made with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, which set funding caps for fiscal year 2024.

But the deal roiled some House conservatives who demanded McCarthy write up 12 separate spending bills at caps lower than those agreed to in the debt ceiling legislation. 

‘Now, a small group of extreme House Republicans, they don’t want to live up to that deal and everyone in America could be faced with paying a price for that,’ he said. ‘We made a deal. We shook hands. We said this is what we’re going to do and now they’re reneging on the deal, which is not much of a surprise these days.’ 

Democrats have launched an all-out campaign to lay blame on Republicans for a government shutdown. 

Earlier the Biden campaign accused House Republicans of ‘gleefully letting Donald Trump function as their chief political strategist at the expense of American families.’

Five days before a government shutdown, it’s not clear the House is any closer to passing a spending deal than it was last week. 

Last week Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., warned shutdowns ‘have always been a loser for Republicans politically’ and that they’ve ‘never produced a policy change.’

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is expected to take yet another gamble with a rule vote that would advance four separate spending bills on Tuesday, though it’s far from clear the rule would pass. 

The speaker would need to flip five Republican holdouts who voted ‘no’ on a rule vote for the defense spending bill last week, a rule vote that failed twice in 48 hours. 

The rule vote that tees up debate on spending bills typically passes with support from almost everyone in the majority party. But the House GOP has struggled to push through a rule vote three times this year. 

The rule vote for the military, the Department of Homeland Security, State and agriculture on Tuesday night will take the temperature for how the rest of the week could play out for House Republicans.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has already said she is a ‘hard no’ on the rule because it includes ‘blood money’ for Ukraine.

McCarthy had said he would strip $300 million to train Ukrainian soldiers from the defense spending bill and hold a separate vote on it on Friday. But he did an about-face and decided to leave the money in their as he realized it would be too difficult to strip that and the Ukraine funding in the bill for State Department funding.  

The other GOP ‘no’ votes include Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Eli Crane (Ariz.), Matt Rosendale (Mont.) and Dan Bishop (N.C.) and it’s not clear if any of them have changed their mind this week. 

Even if they are able to begin debate on the bills, it’s far from clear they could actually pass them.  

And if all 12 appropriations bills were passed by the House, a daunting feat in itself, the government would still shut down because the Senate would never take up and pass those bills by Saturday night. 

Meanwhile, McCarthy is pushing forward with a Republican-only continuing resolution (CR) that would keep the government open and give his conference more time to push through spending bills. 

The Senate, meanwhile, is prepping a bill that could advance a Democrat-led CR  and put pressure on McCarthy to put it on the floor. 

And House moderates have begun to prep their own bipartisan CR plans and look at ways to advance them without the blessing of leadership. Some moderate Republicans have said they would join with Democrats on a discharge petition, meaning they could force a CR vote on the floor if five Republicans and all Democrats agree to it. 

McCarthy has urged his colleagues to fight against a shutdown, even as some seem open to closing the government to get what they want. Trump urged Republicans on Truth Social Sunday: ‘UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!’ 

‘You have to keep the government open. I mean, if people want to close the government — only makes them weaker,’ McCarthy said. 

‘Why would they want to stop paying the troops or stop paying the border agents or the Coast Guard? I don’t understand how that makes you stronger. I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make.’ 

Alexandra Capelouto was found slumped over on her bed by her mother, Christine, two days before Christmas.

The 20-year-old sociology major at Arizona State University, who had returned home to Temecula, California on her winter break in 2019, had taken what she thought was a batch of oxycodone to help her sleep.

Instead, it was fentanyl, the deadly drug destroying lives across America. The man who sold it to her, Brandon Michael McDowell, 23, was jailed for nine years in February.

But Alexandra’s grieving father, Matt Capelouto, believes the state’s liberal lawmakers also ‘have blood on their hands’.

America’s fentanyl crisis was born in the mid-1990s, when pharmaceutical companies falsely claimed ‘revolutionary’ pills would put an end to chronic pain without addiction.

When regulators finally cracked down on that lie and the use of prescription opioids to treat chronic pain, addicts took to the streets in search of heroin, creating an unprecedented health crisis.

But by the mid 2010s, dealers began cutting other substances with fentanyl, which is much cheaper and around fifty times more potent than heroin.

In 2022, the drug caused around three quarters of roughly 110,000 overdose deaths, – meaning fentanyl is killing around 2,000 Americans a week. Of those, roughly 110 are Californians – approximately 5.5 percent. 

The crisis has ravaged many liberal states, creating deep divides within the Democratic Party on how to tackle it.

Matt Capelouto claims efforts by moderate state lawmakers to hold dealers to account are repeatedly blocked by a minority of ‘extreme, far-left’ Democrats who hold ‘too much power’.

In San Francisco, fatal overdoses are already up by 41 percent in the first three months of this year compared to the same period in 2022, with the vast majority of deaths involving fentanyl.

Even before the recent spike, the city had among the highest overdose rates of large US counties.

But its mayor, London Breed, is pumping $18.5million into opening three ‘safe consumption’ sites that critics say keep addicts hooked on drugs, instead of treating them.

And now liberal parents have had enough.

Middle class families who have seen their children’s lives destroyed by the state’s fentanyl crisis have told DailyMail.com that California’s drug laws are ‘insanity’ – keeping their loved ones in ‘bondage’ to their addiction while allowing dealers to act with impunity.

In many cases, victims are star students and athletes from the suburbs, creating a legion of enraged but educated parents challenging the liberal status quo on the war on drugs.

 ‘San Francisco keeps repeating the same mistakes’

Tanya Tilghman, 53, says she has been forced to ‘rethink’ her whole liberal worldview because ‘San Francisco has gone way too far left’.

What caused her to reevaluate?

It could have been the moment she was surrounded by 10 to 15 armed police officers while her fentanyl-crazed son held himself hostage in their family home.

Or the time she was laughed at by staff at the city’s ‘safe consumption’ site after she posed as a drug addict and told them she wanted to get clean.

But the final straw seems to be the city’s decision to pump millions of dollars into opening three more ‘wellness hubs’, despite having closed its first after a year because it wasn’t helping enough people into treatment.

Her son, Roman Vardanega, 23, became hooked on fentanyl after a long battle with drug abuse that began with Adderall in high school, which had been prescribed to treat his ADHD.

In between, he was also addicted to cocaine, heroin and meth, and ran out of a private Sacramento treatment center aged 19.

By the time his mother brought him back to San Francisco, fentanyl had become unavoidable for those living on the streets, as Roman now was.

The drug made him increasingly erratic and he would repeatedly break into Tanya’s home, prompting her to take out a restraining order.

Shortly after, Roman held himself hostage in her home and was taken into custody.

It was around this time that Tanya got wind of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Center, the safe consumption site that opened in January last year.

Mayor Breed had promoted it as a place that would help homeless people struggling with addiction get housing and treatment, so Tanya wanted to find out if it could help her son when he was out of custody.

But when she visited with a group of other mother’s, she heard music blaring and wanted a look inside.

She returned, posing as an addict, and told workers at the center she needed help to get off drugs.

‘They laughed at me,’ she said. ‘They told me they could help me to do drugs if I had my own.

‘I went inside and there was loud music. I could see people shooting up, smoking from pipes.

‘I saw people who were on the ground who looked like they were passed out. Staff didn’t seem to care.

‘I stayed there for a good 30 to 40 minutes, just to see if anyone was going to check on the people who were lying on the ground. Nobody was checking on them.

‘I was thinking: “If I would have brought my son there, there’s no way he would have wanted to get help”.’

The center closed in December after costing roughly $12million. While center staff reversed more than 300 overdoses, fewer than 1 percent of visits resulted in linkages to mental health or drug treatment.

Tanya is furious at Mayor Breed’s recent budget, which allocated millions more dollars to open three new centers.

‘If the Tenderloin Center was such a failure, why open new wellness hubs?’ she asks. ‘Just to call them that is insanity. Enabling people to do drugs, and then having them walk out of the facility high is a danger to the community and a danger to themselves.

‘San Francisco seems to keep repeating the same mistakes.’

A  one-stop shop for drugs

Jacqui Berlinn is similarly perplexed. Her son Corey, is an addict on the streets of San Francisco.

On the day Jacqui speaks to DailyMail.com, it is his 32nd birthday.

Last year, he also visited the Tenderloin Center for help with housing.

But he got only as far as getting a bottle of water before he spotted a friend in the waiting area and the pair ended up smoking fentanyl instead, his mother says.

‘He nodded off and never got seen because, of course, he was distracted by the drug use,’ Jacqui adds.

Corey has deteriorated so rapidly in the few years he has been on fentanyl that Jacqui has asked him if he could back on heroin.

‘It sounds crazy, but he actually stayed fairly healthy on heroin,’ she says. ‘Now he just looks awful. But he’s still there. He’s still very sweet and kind and has a sense of humor, but he’s more sad than he’s ever been.

‘He says he doesn’t want his life to be like this, but he doesn’t know how to get out of it.’

Just this week, Jacqui spoke with Corey about San Francisco’s approach to the crisis. ‘Even he said to me, “I don’t know what the mayor is doing”.

‘She is not helping addicts at all. Because they’re putting money into wellness hubs that give addicts everything they need in order to use, but they don’t help with getting people off drugs.

‘They allow people to use openly without consequence. They allow dealers to sell openly in front of police officers.’

Jacqui, along with other San Franciscan parents whose children have been stolen by fentanyl, have set up Mothers Against Drug Addiction & Deaths, a group that lobbies lawmakers for stricter penalties for dealers.

They have erected billboards blaming politicians for the drug crisis, including a ‘Welcome to Camp Fentanyl’ campaign calling for California Governor Gavin Newsom to shut down open-air drug markets, where dealers are allowed to sell drugs without fear of arrest.

The Tenderloin Center was situated directly across from the largest such market in San Francisco, where at least 100 drug dealers gather in the sunshine, creating what Jacqui describes as ‘a one-stop shop’ for drugs.

Addicts would buy their pills from the market and then pop across the plaza to the Tenderloin Center to take them.

To make matters worse, Corey has to walk through this scene to get to his methadone clinic.

‘They’re opposed to putting anybody behind bars’

While California does little to help addicts get off drugs, its lawmakers seem reluctant to punish those who supply them.

In April, Democrats struck down Alexandra’s Law, named after Matt’s daughter, which proposed strengthening penalties for dealers.

The proposed law would see convicted fentanyl dealers receive a warning from judges that would act as a precursor to a potential homicide charge if they then dealt drugs that killed someone.

The law was modeled on DUI legislation, which supporters claim has reduced instances of drink driving.

Despite bipartisan support, the bill failed to get past committee stage due to opposition from Democrat senators Scott Weiner, Nancy Skinner and Steven Bradford.

Tensions almost spilled over as the State Senate’s Public Safety Committee debated the bill, as angry parents yelled at lawmakers to hold dealers accountable.

Matt believes the Democrats opposed to the bill ‘willfully misled’ the public by arguing that the proposed law would prosecute dealers who weren’t aware their drugs were laced with fentanyl, with Wiener incorrectly suggesting that those who are caught drink driving after being spiked are not charged with an offense.

‘They’re opposed to putting anybody behind bars,’ he says. ‘They’ll come up with every excuse to make the victim the criminal.’

On Tuesday, state Republicans proposed a referendum on Alexandra’s Law to bypass the committee.

To go to a public vote, it will require two thirds of both the Assembly and the Senate to agree on it.

But Tanya believes the city’s entire attitude to drugs needs to change.

‘San Francisco has always been pro drugs,’ she says. ‘That dates back to the 60s and 70s. They still have the same message that it’s okay to use drugs.

‘But what they are failing to understand is that fentanyl has changed the entire drug outlook. We have so many more people dying, they’re cutting it in all different types of drugs.

‘I don’t understand that mentality. We’re in a city where we’re losing all of the major retail stores because of crime and because of all the drug dealing that’s going on.

‘Putting up more wellness hubs is going to attract more drug dealers and more people coming in and wanting to use drugs and crime is going to increase further.’

For Matt, it took four years to see the man who poisoned his daughter behind bars, but the anguish will never pass.

A year before the sentencing, his wife, Christine, was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. She was told her disease was not genetic and was more than likely caused by grief.

As a final wish, the couple have just returned from a holiday to the Netherlands, visiting a family with whom Alexandra stayed on a school exchange.

Matt will continue campaigning for Alexandra’s legacy and that of his three surviving daughters, Skye, Brooke and Brittney.

‘Alex is my daughter in heaven now,’ he says. ‘Here I am, three and a half years later and probably not an hour goes by where I’m not thinking about her in some way.’

The world’s first walking manikin that generates heat, shivers, walks and breathes like a human could help scientists understand our body’s resilience to punishing heat waves.

Scientists at Arizona State University (ASU) redesigned a robot used by clothing companies for sports gear to mimic the thermal functions of the human body.

The test droid, ANDI, was fitted with synthetic pores for artificial sweating, temperature, and heat flux sensors across the 35 different surface areas covering its manikin body. 

With a novel internal cooling channel, this improved ASU ANDI is the first thermal manikin fit for outdoor use — meaning that scientists can now subject this climate change ‘test dummy’ to the extreme temperatures of the Arizona desert.

‘You can’t put humans in dangerous extreme heat situations and test what would happen,’ said atmospheric scientist Jenni Vanos, an associate professor at ASU’s School of Sustainability.

‘But there are situations we know of in the Valley where people are dying of heat, and we still don’t fully understand what happened.

‘ANDI can help us figure that out.’

Across the United States, thousands of people die from heat stroke and other heat-related ailments each year, a figure rising due to climate change. 

In Arizona’s Maricopa County alone, 425 people died of heat-related medical issues in 2022 — over a hundred more than the heat-related deaths reported in 2021. 

ASU’s researchers are hoping to bring that number down by better understanding how people of different ages with different body types and medical conditions respond to extreme heat waves, extended sun exposure and other harsh conditions. 

Doing so, however, poses some experimental challenges. 

‘You don’t want to run a lot of these [tests] with a real person,’ professor Konrad Rykaczewski at Arizona State University told the Arizona Republic. ‘It’s unethical and would be dangerous.’

Inside ASU, ANDI’s lab work is not too dissimilar from the handful of other ANDIs sweating it out inside the prototype shops of major sportswear makers. It’s just a little more intense.   

Housed in a heat chamber, the researchers have called the ‘Warm Room,’ ANDI is subjected to wind, solar radiation, and temperatures up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Between trials, ANDI can be reprogrammed to react as different people based on weight, age and other factors. 

‘A diabetes patient has different thermal regulation from a healthy person,’ according to ASU research scientist Ankit Joshi, who leads the modeling work that goes into ANDI. ‘So we can account for all this modification with our customized models.’ 

And the Warm Room can also be modulated to simulate various heat-exposure scenarios common to any hot spot around the globe.

But it’s outside in the southwestern desert heat where ASU’s modded ANDI meets its toughest challenges and most important work. 

The thermal manikin can sweat, with custom-built internal cooling channels to circulate cool water throughout its body, while it simulates and records human reactions to heat from complex environments. 

ANDI’s sensors collect distinct data on a body type’s reaction to solar radiation from the sun, infrared radiation wafting up from the warm asphalt ground, and heat convection circulating in the air. The hope, in part, is that the ASU team can investigate solutions to community-building plans.

When the ASU team drapes ANDI in special fabric, its simulated sweat wicks and cools its sensor-laden robotic surfaces, just as if it were a real and genuinely uncomfortable human sweltering in Arizona.

This summer, ANDI will team up with a new partner: ASU’s biometeorological heat robot, MaRTy, a suite of complex heat sensors mounted on a garden cart.

‘MaRTy can tell us how the built environment modifies the amount of heat that hits the body,’ said Ariane Middel, an ASU researcher whose urban planning and design work focuses on climate issues. ‘But MaRTy doesn’t know what happens inside the body.’ 

‘MaRTy measures the environment,’ Middel said, ‘and then ANDI can then tell us how the body can react.’

ANDI and MaRTy’s first missions will take them around ASU’s Tempe, Arizona campus. 

The duo will travel the Phoenix metro area to gather data on overheated and at-risk living conditions, like unshaded neighborhood streets and poorly ventilated old mobile homes with broken air conditioning.

ANDI came to ASU custom-built from its manufacturer Thermetics, thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation’s Leading Engineering for America’s Prosperity, Health and Infrastructure (LEAP HI) program.

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