Most now expect the government to close at midnight tonight. This seems certain, as the Senate isn’t planning to vote on anything until around 1 AM.
Republicans want to blame Democrats for this; Democrats want to blame Republicans.
So…who’s right?
Personally, I blame the Democrats.
Republicans in the House were the ones that actually passed a bill to keep the government open. 6 Democrats joined them to vote this bill through. The bill did in fact fund CHIP for another 6 years.
Democrats in the Senate are the ones that say they’ll vote against that bill, effectively shutting down the federal government for the first time since 2013.
It all comes down to DACA.
Democrats are more concerned about 800,000 illegal aliens than they are about the 320 million legal citizens that live in this country.
While the government will shutdown in a few hours, DACA doesn’t officially expire until March 5.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Democrats are a minority Party that focus on minority issues.
By focusing on DACA, Democrats think that they’ll not only take back the Senate in November, but the House as well.
It’s possible. But is it likely?
It all comes down to which Party can spin this shutdown better.
Democrats are convinced that if they just keep blaming Republicans, they’ll get the public on their side.
Republicans are convinced that if they just keep brining up DACA and how Democrats shut the government down over this, they’ll get the public on their side.
Again, I think the Republicans have a much stronger argument here.
For the past day now, they’ve been bashing the Dems over the head with DACA. Many, many people in the country now associate this government shutdown with the Dems’ stubbornness on that issue.
Republicans are now calling it the “Schumer Shutdown.”
When it comes to Dems…gosh, I’m not really sure what their argument is.
I don’t think Dems know, either.
Currently, Dems are offering an ‘olive branch’ of keeping the government open for 3 to 5 more days via a stop-gap spending measure.
Republicans are saying they don’t want to vote for anymore temporary fixes, whether it’s 5 days or 30. They want a real budget that goes for years so we can stop playing these childish games each year.
A big problem for Republicans, however, is that they control all three branches of government right now. And yet they still can’t govern or get their agenda through? That smacks of incompetence.
And my, how close we were.
A week ago Trump made it clear that if Congress would just put a DACA bill in front of him, he’d sign it.
But then, wouldn’t you know it…Dick Durbin got in the way.
After a closed-door meeting, Durbin rushed to the press and told of Trump’s shithole comments.
That killed DACA. It killed all Republican support for it, and it put the president on a warpath with congressional Democrats…even though a few days before he’d had a lengthy and public meeting to try and iron-out their differences.
Dick Durbin won’t be up again until 2020, and I hope at that point someone can either primary or general him.
If it wasn’t for that guy, DACA would probably have passed by now and our fears over a government shut down would be unfounded.
But he just had to talk.
Alas, that talk didn’t lead to Trump’s impeachment…it just led to Democrats not getting their way. I guess this is the ‘leverage’ they so often speak of.
Again, it all comes down to who can play this better in the media.
I think the GOP has it in the bag.
Over the past week, we’ve heard a lot about DACA and over the past day we’ve learned that this is the Dems’ only real issue.
800,000 illegal aliens are more important to Democrats than the 320 million citizens that live in this country.
Hell, the 800,000 can’t even vote!
I fail to see what Democrats hope to accomplish here. I was hoping cooler heads in the Party would prevail, but there are no cool heads.
There are only idiots…idiots that think they actually have a winning issue on their hands.
It’ll be fun to see their faces when they realize they not only lost this issue, but they might have lost all chances this November as well.
