Was it just me, or did he seem to take a bit too long to catch on?
I admit some aspects of this baffle me. Threatening to shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t get your wall funded seems to me to be a dubious negotiating strategy. Trump turned down wall funding for DACA earlier this year, even though almost 75% of Republicans support DACA. Cite. Slate said, Trump should have taken Schumer’s early 2018 offer. Perry Bacon at 538 disagreed.
I’m wondering why Trump couldn’t have offered a package of things conservative Democratic Senators like in exchange for $2-5 billion of wall. The wall is an impotent waste of money, but this white elephant does little direct harm to anyone. Aside from being a racially motivated talking point and a minor taxpayer burden that is.
Well, at least we appear to have avoided a Trump shutdown.
Actually, a lot of property owners could be screwed mightily by eminent domain takings, not to mention potentially catastrophic environmental damage.
And last time I checked, our God-Emperor is now saying he won’t sign the CR without wall funding.
So they’re saying that this likely won’t pass the Senate because it needs 60 votes. Is that because of the cloture rule?
Pretty much, yes.
Has there even been two high-profile shutdowns in a year before? Remember, we pretty much started this year with this bullshit too exactly 11 months ago.
And you can bet that McConnell will be asked to destroy the filibuster in order to ram this through. I’m not betting against it after that tactic was used to appoint the Supreme Court justice stolen from Obama.
He was tweet-bragging about how gracious he was to keep the government open … until his FoxNews overlords told him not to be such a pansy. So, after Congress had gone to some effort to pass a bipartisan and then taken taxis to the airport for Christmas, he tweeted his change-of-mind. (One GOP Senator is quoted with “You couldn’t make this shit up” or some such.)
And he seems very proud that this shutdown may last “a very long time.” It will be the biggest, longest shutdown ever — everybody’s saying so. MAGA.
Government by tweet. The top military and foreign policy advisers all learned of his Syria pull-out from the tweet-box. (I guess if they want advance knowledge of Trump’s foreign policy jerkings they should ask the Kremlin.)
Trump has called for the thermonuclear option — McConnell and Pence just unilaterally decree that cloture requires simple majority. But aren’t Senators already boarding airplanes? Do they have monitors at the airports making sure a GOP Senator can’t board unless a Demo boards first?
Unless I’m misunderstanding the rules (that 50+1 votes needed to eliminate the filibuster), there’s no chance of this occurring. Even on the off chance that McConnell has 51 votes for Trump’s border wall (which seems highly unlikely), he doesn’t have anywhere close to 51 votes to eliminate the filibuster. He might not even have 10 or 20 votes for that.
I believe that both Orrin Hatch and Jeff Flake have said they would vote against removing the 60 senator cloture rule. I’m pretty certain that there are other Republican senators who would feel the same way, and will be in the Senate with the new Congress.
Yeah, the GOP and Trump are scared shitless of her. I dont like all of her politics, but no doubt, she is really effective.
Not quite. Good and fun things like Federal parks and monuments get closed.
So yeah, the Army gets paid, the FBI, etc. But we, as taxpayers, are affected. And it doesnt save money, either, as all those govt workers have to be paid afterwards.
IRS keeps chugging, but no more tax audits, oddly.