“Shutdowns are terrible,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) admitted several times in an October television interview.

Clark spoke of “families that are going to suffer.” She insisted that her party, which at least technically caused the shutdown by refusing to end a filibuster in the Senate , “take[s] that responsibility very seriously.” At the same time, she told Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pergram that a federal government partial shutdown is “one of the few leverage times we have,” as a party without majorities in either house of Congress . “It is an inflection point in this budget process.”

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