Shutdown

It's amusing to listen to Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media repeat some variation of "the GOP controls the House, the Senate and the Executive—therefore, they're responsible for the shutdown." Although this meme sounds reasonable for those who are uninformed, it's dishonest. To pass a budget or even a continuing resolution, 60 votes are required in the Senate. Depending on the variation, between 46 and 50 of 51 GOP senators voted to keep the government running, but only 3 to 6 Democrats of 49 voted similarly. That means that about 45 Dems on average decided that intransigence was a better option that giving the hated Donald Trump a win.

The shut down happened because the Democrats appear to be more concerned about the fate of 800,000 children of illegal immigrants than they are with tens of millions of real citizens who depend on government programs, including about 8 million children who depend on the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) program. Making things look even worse for the Dems, they have until March to resolve the DACA issue—why shut down the government now?

David Harsanyi comments:

Democrats blame the GOP solely for the shutdown. Yet, any person with even rudimentary understanding of American governance knows that’s not how this works. A minority can shut down the government — which amounts to very little but a paid vacation for non-essential government workers. In this case, they’re helping to do it because of an ancillary issue. Democrats will block the longest-ever extension of the CHIP program, because they believe it politically expedient to connect the DACA issue to the funding debate. Perhaps it’s good politics. We’ll see.

But the fact is, during the shutdown of 2013, the consensus of all serious, right-thinking people was that Republicans, who took basically the same position, were unfit to govern. When Republicans in the Senate were pushing for a pipeline in the spending bill, an issue their base happens to find important, Obama’s speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote, “Obama will not — he cannot — negotiate with a roving band of anarchists who say, ‘Build our oil pipeline or the troops don’t get paid.’”

The media cheered that position then, but it just might be that Donald Trump has decided to steal a strategy from the Dem playbook, possibly showing the Dems pushing a small child off a cliff (sound familiar?) and then refusing to "negotiate with a roving band of anarchists" who say Amnesty for DACA or small children won't get their healthcare.

This may well be a case where the Dems have overplayed their hand. After all, it's possible that they'll be blamed for the shutdown. Even worse, people won't notice much difference and just might come to realize that some of the services provided by the Feds aren't quite as essential as the Dems tell us they are. The Dems might lose both ways.