Pelosi and Schumer say they'll pass legislation to end the shutdown. How?

I don’t know if it will be resolved quickly. That was the point of the OP. The democrats think they can resolve it after taking power.

Imho There probably won’t be an easy solution. This may drag on for a few weeks.

We do have some Senators that can vote with impunity because they are leaving in a few days.

That may be important or not. I’m very curious to see how it plays out.

You think he’s read it once already?

I have been. Or maybe it was the sequester. I wasn’t badly hurt by it, but I did waste a trip across town to an office that was closed.

And a substantial proportion of the country are employed by the federal government.

Most of the federal government is not affected by the shutdown.

75% (roughly) of the government is already funded.

Of the 25% not funded, roughly half of the employees are considered “critical”, and are forced to work without pay until the shutdown is ended and they get backpay.

So there are only a small number of federal employees that have to stop working and go home during the shutdown. That means that the odds of running into a closed up federal facility is relatively small.

The trouble, of course, is that the closed up facilities tend to cluster among certain federal agencies that aren’t deemed to be “critical”. So, for example, since making sure terrorists don’t get on airplanes with guns, all those TSA employees who make you take out the liquids and remove your belt, etc., will be working. That’s a lot of employees. But you’ll be out of luck if you’re currently involved with the IRS, as they (for the most part) aren’t considered critical. That’s roughly 52,000 employees, btw.

The one that shocked me was NASA. Ninety-six percent of NASA employees will be furloughed. Presumably, that doesn’t include the New Horizons staff. :eek:

Maybe something good could come of this shutdown, as the newest Trumptweet points out:

On a totally unrelated note…Is there a smiley available that both rolls its eyes and throws up at the same time?

That’s interesting. SpaceX just launched a GPS satellite yesterday morning. I don’t know all the details, but I would have guessed that NASA would have a bunch of personnel involved in that launch. Maybe not? Or maybe they were the 4%?

You don’t get in to a standoff with a sociopath.

Eventually, Dems are going to worry about all the people affected by by this.

Trump is incapable of this sort of empathy.

Worse. By extension you imply he is capable…

It’s a USAF mission, not NASA.

And yet, somehow it’s advisable to negotiate with an angry bull.

Totally agree.

The average President would eventually back down.

A Narcissist like Trump probably won’t. Unless the D’s frame it in a way that he can claim some kind of win. Doesn’t have to be anything big. Just something he can inflate & brag about.

Depressing, but that’s who they are dealing with.

Each two-year term of a Representative constitutes a Congress. That’s why this current one is called the 115th United States Congress. The one starting in January will therefore be the 116th United States Congress.

Bills must be passed within a Congress and if not, die with the end of the two-year cycle. They must be drafted again for the new Congress.

The moron believes that government shutdowns save money.

So the smiley needed is one that ‘rolls its eyes’ and ‘throws up’ and ‘despairs for the incredible, mind-boggling folly of those who voted an imbecile into the Oval Office, thinking that their action made some sort of sense.’

I did that bolding.

Ok, thank you.

We have a bunch of house members, including Paul Ryan, who won’t be back in January. Paul Ryan had the option of putting the bipartisan bill on the President’s desk. Instead he went back to one of his go to moves from the Obama days, passing a bill that he knew had no chance of making through the senate. This mess is Paul Ryan’s final fuck you to the American People.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that 100-0 vote was at the point that Trump had said he would accept such a bill. Then Trump got his marching orders from Fox and changed his (to use the term loosely) mind. At that point Ryan refused to allow a vote on it and substituted a bill that funded the wall. At any rate the bill that got the 100-0 vote dies on Jan. 3 and is unlikely to make it through the senate after all that has been happening. McConnell certainly will not allow the senate to consider a bill Trump says he will veto. This could go on a good long time.

Yes, I think that’s right.

And I think that the OP has glided over that point in his discussion of who the grown-ups are:

  1. The Dems said they wouldn’t vote for $5 billion for the wall at this time. Clear position to start the negotiations.

  2. Trump grudgingly agreed to let a continuing resolution go through without the wall money, to bridge over the Christmas season and last until early February.

  3. The Dems and his own Repubs in the Senate unanimously passed the bill Trump had said he would agree to.

  4. Anne Coulter writes a blog post to the tune of “Colonel Bogey”: “… and Trumpy has no balls at all!”

  5. Other right-wingers like Rush and the Teapot caucus shout “Hear, hear!”

  6. Trump, outraged by the attack by his own so-called supporters, does an about-face and announces he won’t sign the bill, the same bill that he had said just earlier that week that he would accept.

  7. Chuck and Nancy say “Nothing has happened to change our position.”

  8. Penis ensues.
    So, who’s the adult in this situation? I think it’s pretty clear…

At the same time, for something like this there will be a draft prepared and ready to be submited by the morning of the 3rd and it will get filed as soon as everyone’s sworn in and the Clerks opens their in-boxes . Heck, multiple drafts from both sides.

Do you seriously think Trump has read The Art Of The Deal even once?

Translation: “If we just give Trump the incredibly expensive boondoggle he wants that achieves fucking nothing, we can stop him from shutting down the government!”

Imagine, for a moment, that instead of a wasteless border wall that does nothing (and which 5 billion dollars won’t even come close to covering), Trump was demanding 5 billion dollars for some other stupid vanity project. Maybe a 50-foot gold statue or something. Imagine that a great many republicans favored it, but most independents and almost all democrats were against it. Imagine that the republican senate and house were pretty much okay with not bothering.

Would it make any sense for the democrats to go along with that?

Because make no mistake, the rest of us see the wall as about as useful and valuable as a 50-foot gold statue of Trump. It serves about the same purpose, too - fulfilling this megalomaniac’s ego.

Meanwhile, Flint still doesn’t fucking have water. Just sayin’. In fact, there’s a whole lot of things that seem far more valuable than building a useless, overpriced fucking wall. Here’s a short list:

[ul]
[li]Fixing Flint’s plumbing system[/li][li]Repairing Puerto Rico[/li][li]Fixing any number of crumbling roads and bridges[/li][li]Improving our infrastructure for the homeless[/li][li]Investing in universal healthcare[/li][li]Offering a slightly larger tax cut[/li][li]Paying down the government debt[/li][li]Servicing interest payments[/li][li]Investing in better systems to track people whose visas expire[/li][li]Doing literally anything that isn’t a gigantic stupid pointless wall![/li][/ul]

And did I mention that Flint is still without water? :slight_smile:

The word is not “rhetoric”. It is “lie”. Trump lied.