Posted on 10/03/2025 11:47:47 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The president argues that the federal bureaucracy is useless. Shutdowns tend to reinforce that view.
For any party shut out of power in Washington, there are only bad options and worse. Try to project sobriety and your base calls you weak; lodge a bunch of protests and you mostly look small. Everything you do registers between feckless and futile.
So I can understand how Democratic leaders came to see a government shutdown as their last, best recourse. It’s half performance for their own furious voters, half primal scream at the unfairness of the universe.
It’s also a shortsighted gambit that will do more to undermine their core argument than to strengthen it.
The ostensible reason for forcing a shutdown has to do with the Affordable Care Act; Republicans would allow a Covid-era expansion of subsidies to expire, endangering health care coverage for millions of Americans starting next year. Republican Senate leaders say they’re willing to negotiate over the issue — but not until Democrats allow for a temporary extension of government funding.
That’s as much of a concession as Democrats are likely to get, and probably where they’ll end up anyway. So it’s reasonable to wonder what kind of grand strategy they think they’re pursuing here. The Democratic leader in the Senate, New York’s Chuck Schumer, gave us a glimpse into his 3D chess-master thinking this week when he told reporters: “The strategy is — the American people are demanding it.”
Huh. If I might paraphrase a famous line from “The Princess Bride,” I’m not sure the word “strategy” means what he thinks it means.
What Schumer is really thinking, I suspect, is that this tactic worked out pretty well the last time they used it, so why not try it again? That was in 2019, when Democrats...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
what are they talking about, what shutdown?
I’m waiting for the layoffs. This is a huge opportunity to nuke the Progressive State.
I’ve heard that Trump wanted to wait 2 - 3 days. But I’m afraid that if he hasn’t started big layoffs by the end of Monday, it’s just not gonna happen.
It used to be you could reach even Democratic voters with reason and logic. I recall protestors screaming at a confused and flustered President Obama who said something like, “Don’t you understand? It’s us. We’ve won.” But they shouted him down. It was his own party screaming at him.
Before gay marriage was institutionalized, the LGB crowd understood they had to sit quietly in the background, and they’d eventually get what they wanted. There’s no reasoning with them now. After the Trump victory a Democratic politician was trying to talk to a crowd about what they had to do to regain power and she said, “We have to simply stop talking about things like Trans.” A huge man dressed as a woman got in her face shouting at her. She looked terrified and the video cut out at that point. But I don’t think she was going to suggest they do anything antitrans. She just understood it didn’t play well, and they needed to stop talking about it because it turned off the voters.
Markets don’t seem to care either. New highs today.
Sunrise was on time again today.
After 30 days of shut down, the Americans will discover that not much has changed. Then they will ask are we better off with less government? Good Bye Libs! Dirty little secret will be out!
What an excellent knife thrust...
It does make me wonder how this ends. It hurts Dims more but they apparently don’t care.
Government shutdowns are only the consequence of unsuccessful shakedowns.
Well this guy gets it half right in that the Dems are stupid to do this but other than that he’s just another lefty fool.
In 2019 after 35 days there was widespread blowback from the public because of flight delays caused by the shutdown. So people do notice eventually but not so much in the first two weeks or so. Even red states get agitated in long shutdowns when their Federal education and highway funding money doesn’t show up.
Meme I came across: Keep in mind that democrats voted to fine American citizens for not buying insurance, and then conspired to give it to illegal aliens for free.
Pelosi & Chuckles get to watch it all disintegrate right before their eyes. I maybe enjoying this too much.
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