Government shutdown

The end of the Democrats’ government shutdown is at last in sight, and so too is the final act of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. On Sunday night, eight Senate Democrats finally broke with Schumer and voted in favor of a procedural step necessary to eventually pass a continuing resolution to end the more than monthlong standoff. “Democrats have been fighting for months to address America's healthcare crisis,” tweeted Schumer, who vowed that they would “keep fighting.” It was the kind of weak, empty gesture that has come to define Schumer’s tenure at the helm of his conference. Because regardless of what spin Schumer might like to put on this turn of events, the truth is that it represents yet another unambiguous failure on his part.

Donald Trump keeps going nuclear. First it was his demand on Thursday that the Pentagon resume nuclear testing. Now he’s declaring that the Senate must abolish the filibuster in toto. In a post on his social media site, Trump announced: “THE CHOICE IS CLEAR – INITIATE THE ‘NUCLEAR OPTION,’ GET RID OF THE FILIBUSTER.” Are Republican senators seeking to duck and cover in the face of Trump’s exhortations? Not a chance. Rather, in an unusual turn of events, they are defying him. Senate majority leader John Thune issued a statement on Friday morning indicating that he has not altered his views about amending the filibuster. Meanwhile, Senator John Curtis of Utah posted on X Friday morning that the filibuster “forces us to find common ground.

It isn’t just a weekend of warmer weather for the President, who took off for Mar-a-Lago yesterday evening. It is possibly a weekend full of calmer news. The decision from Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer to let the spending bill advance in the Senate allowed the six-month extension to get over the line last night, as the Senate voted 54-46 to see it through. This seemed to give markets a temporary sense of relief as well, as growing expectation that the bill would pass saw stocks rally. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq had their best day gains since Donald Trump took office again, while technology stocks also appeared to make a major comeback by the time markets closed yesterday.

Call it the ultimate example of budgetary FAFO — or "F- around and find out": Republicans are practically daring Democrats in the Senate to follow through on Chuck Schumer’s threat to vote against the six-month continuing resolution passed by the House Tuesday night on a near-party-line vote. With Senator Rand Paul joining his fellow libertarian-minded Kentuckyian Representative Thomas Massie in opposing the measure, Republicans likely need eight Democrats to cross over. And despite Schumer’s claim yesterday that Republicans won’t get those votes, everyone in the know in Washington believes the old man’s threat is fist-shaking at clouds.

A stopgap government funding bill was signed into law by President Biden late Saturday, keeping the government open for another forty-five days, through November 17. The proposed bill, which passed the House of Representatives earlier Saturday afternoon, does not include the $6 million that the Senate’s own funding measure would have. It will, however, increase federal disaster assistance by $16 million, meeting President Biden’s full request.  The bill passed the House of Representatives 335-91, despite resistance from MAGA Republicans that led to a standoff over spending for weeks. Ninety House Republicans led by Representative Matt Gaetz, voted against the bill.

As the government barrels towards a shutdown, bipartisan flurries of lawmakers are rolling out legislation. They are taking aim at lawmaker pay, even their ability to raise money while American troops, border patrol and millions of others in the federal workforce go without remuneration. One man has found himself at the center of it all: a military veteran and freshman member of Congress who wants to make the nation’s capital in Washington, DC look a lot more like Iowa’s capital, Des Moines. As a state senator, Zach Nunn passed legislation that banned his colleagues, and himself, from trading individual stocks. He wasn’t necessarily ready to find senators in DC shoveling wads of cash and bricks of gold into their closets.

The choose your own adventure surrounding House Republican leadership is leading to a predictable dead end. The approach House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has used to great effect to this point, achieving far more legislatively than he was expected to in a Speakership with a razor-thin majority, has been to let conservatives get a seat at the table to demand what they want, and work from there. The strength of that strategy was giving House conservatives buy-in on the negotiating process, thus using them as an ally, not an adversary. The weakness of that strategy? It doesn’t work when the conservatives can’t agree about what they want.

Congressional leaders reached ‘an agreement in principle’ Monday night on a budget deal to prevent another government shutdown, Sen. Richard Shelby told reporters, according to Reuters. The tentative deal is far short of the $5.7 billion for border security that President Trump had demanded to keep the government open in December. Instead, this plan sets aside $1.4 billion and allows the building for an additional 55 miles of barriers to be added to the approximately 700 miles of barriers that already exist, Congressional aides say. President Trump has repeatedly said that a wall is not required along all of the nearly 2,000 miles of border that Mexico shares with the United States.

Donald Trump’s reputation took a battering during the shutdown. He said he would own it, and he did. He took the blame and then he took the hit when he agreed to end the partial federal closure without winning funding for his border wall. So what was the point? A new set of polling figures reveals the point with hard numbers. It turns out that while his stand was broadly unpopular across the country, his no-nonsense stance resonated with one critical cohort of voters – people in key battleground districts, those that voted Trump in 2016 but swung Democratic in the midterms. They gave him the win on the wall and border security.

Trump caved, Trump caved, Trump caved. That’s the incantation, and if you repeat it long enough, the words begin to feel right. The president’s capitulation was ‘total’, say the media heads. He has been ‘humiliated.’ Nancy Pelosi ‘took him to the cleaners’ and ‘kicked his behind.’ This, apparently, qualifies as high-level political analysis. The trouble is, it isn’t true. Trump didn’t cave. He backed off. He may have folded, temporarily, but what journalists and many Democrats struggle to understand is that elections are not won and lost in news cycles. The irony is that many of Trump’s opponents accuse him of having ADD, of being a Twitter addict who watches too much 24-hour rolling news.

There are at least two tasty dishes in the smorgasbord today: one is the latest action of the fourth branch of the US government, the one run by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller. The other is an announcement from the head of the second branch, the executive, that the month-long government furlough would be suspended for three weeks, until February 15, while House leaders pretend to negotiate with President Trump over the issue of border security and, in particular, appropriating funds to build a wall along vulnerable parts of our Southern border. Both dishes look promising, so let’s take a taste of both. First, the Stone soup, or perhaps I should say Stone in soup, for that would seem to be where Roger Stone, colorful Trump ally and Wikileaks expert, has been firmly placed.

It wasn’t quite the Cena Trimalchionis, but the robust, non-sissy feast that the President of the United States laid on for the Clemson Tigers — the college football team that just won the national championship — would in its own way have been the envy of Petronius’s diners. No larks’ tongues, but plenty of Big Macs, Whoppers, French fries, and pizza, all served up on gleaming White House china with the condiment proffered from silver bowls. Donald Trump paid for the repast himself — 1,000 hamburgers he said at one point, though fact checkers at the publicity arm of the Democratic National Committee said that there were probably no more than 300.

After his soporific performance last night on national television, Donald Trump is back in form. He just engineered a fresh shutdown this afternoon. At a meeting with congressional Democrats this afternoon, Trump threw a temper tantrum, slamming his fist on the Resolute Desk and exiting the Oval Office. He tweeted, ‘Just left a meeting with Chuck and Nancy, a total waste of time. I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, NO. I said bye-bye, nothing else works!’By the bye, Trump is insisting that Republicans have never been more unified.