At midnight on Wednesday, the federal government shut down. Democrats made good on their promise to vote against a continuing resolution if Republicans didn’t extend expiring Obamacare tax credits, and funding expired. Now, both sides are digging in to play the blame game.

Democrats argue that Republicans are to blame for refusing to budge on health care, while Republicans blame Democrats for refusing to provide the votes to keep the government open. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is making an unprecedented threat to not just furlough federal workers — normal for a shutdown — but lay them off outright and go after programs Democrats support.

To try and make sense of how we got here and what’s happening now, Today Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of the party’s leading voices on the shut down fight.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

The government is shut down. The Democrats shut it down. I wonder who you think people will blame, you guys or the Republicans?

Let’s back up just a tiny little bit. What happened in July was that the Republicans said, “Yeah, yeah, we know the budget’s out there, but we want to make this change to the budget. We want to roll back healthcare coverage for 15 million Americans, because we want to use that money for tax breaks for a handful of billionaires and billionaire corporations.”

And Democrats said, “You can’t do that, we already had a budget, we already allocated that money.” And Republicans said, “Oh, yes we can.” And they voted it through. Only Republicans voted for it. And the Democrats just stood by, because it was a special device that only took 50 votes.

Now,........

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