Parts of the government are due to shut down Friday through lack of funding. To prevent this from happening, the House of Representatives just passed a two-week “stopgap” continuing resolution.
It will provide funding for the departments of Homeland Security, State, Interior, Justice, Transportation and Commerce, among others, until Dec. 21. The legislation also provides a two-week stop-gap for the National Flood Insurance Program and extends programs included in the last stopgap measure, such as the Violence Against Women Act for an additional two weeks.
The Senate is expected to follow suit later on Thursday. This will hardly solve the problem, however. Unless a deal on President Trump’s border wall is struck, Congress will have to pass another continuing resolution before the members go home for Christmas or we will end the year with a crippled government.
Nancy Pelosi is still the House Minority Leader rather than the Speaker of the House, so she can’t dictate anything at this point, but she seems just fine with punting on the wall for the remainder of the fiscal year.
Pelosi said said her preferred solution for meeting the new deadline is for Congress to pass the six appropriations bills that appropriators have agreement on with a continuing resolution for the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] measure.
As Greg Sargent explains, the Senate Democrats are generally uninterested in paying for a project the president repeatedly guaranteed would be funded by the Mexican government, but they have agreed to plop down $1.6 billion for enhanced border security. That money can be spent on certain kinds of fencing but explicitly cannot be spent on a wall. Now the Republicans are trying to say it’s a win and Trump should claim victory while the Democrats are insisting it’s not a win and the president can take it or leave it.
So far, Trump doesn’t seem inclined to accept either the congressional Republicans’ definition of a wall or the $1.6 billion level of funding. He wants $5 billion.
The Senate Republicans have tried to explain that the votes aren’t there for $5 billion and that they’ve already struck a deal for the $1.6. Trump doesn’t seem to care. As a result, we might see a Christmas shutdown.
Sargent argues that the Democrats should not fear a showdown with the president on this, nor should they make any further concessions. The Republicans ran a xenophobic campaign and wound up losing the House elections by the biggest raw total margin in history.
Democrats must shore up the notion that the midterms represented an unambiguous public rejection of his xenophobic nationalism. Republicans ran despicable race-baiting ads across the country that echoed Trump’s own message, which employed all kinds of lies about migrants and asylum seekers to portray them as a malicious, destructive, invasive force. He even used the military as a prop to bolster the GOP’s campaign propaganda. Democratic polling showed that voters roundly rejected this message.
Pelosi’s offer is a continuing resolution with $1.3 billion for (wall-restricted) border security, and even that is earning her some criticism from immigration advocates who rightly see this as a misallocation of funds and priorities. Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is on board with this take it or leave it approach.
They should probably use that negotiating strategy where every time an offer is rejected, the next offer is worse. In a few weeks, they will control the House and I see no reason to make a concession in December that they’d never make in January.
Trump may figure that the public usually takes the president’s side in a shutdown showdown, which is accurate. But the Republicans are divided on this and the Democrats are looking very united.
Plus, the Democrats have one of the best talking points in history: If the president wants more money for the Department of Homeland Security to spend on a border wall, he has to keep his promise and get it from the Mexicans.
Yes, that is a very good talking point.
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I hope you’re right about all of this. I don’t think shutdowns play well, and I fear (popular) stupidity and media diddledoodling.
Is there any chance that the real GOP strategy is to pass one more continuing resolution and then saddle the new Democratic House with the issue in January?
Every other government shutdown since the first one in 1995 was initiated by a Republican HOR. I am not aware that the Chief Executive has any power to unilaterally shutdown the government or any of its constituent agencies unless Congress agrees to not fund it/them.
Once the Democrats take over in January, they will pass any remaining appropriations and send it on to the Senate and the President for passage. In the past, at least, even a Republican Senate has been very reluctant to shutdown the government with the exception of Rafael “Ted” Cruz, of course. If Trump vetoes any appropriations bills then the Democrats should definitely make the next deal even worse. He’s an incompetent and an idiot so I am all in with telling him to get the funding from Mexico (I know LOL). In any event, he going to be dealing with a whole passle of investigations anyway,.
National Trumpalism is not going to give up on Latino immigrant hatred, especially after it ensures them permanent control of the anti-democratic white minority senate. The Trumpalists may have overplayed their hand with the race hatred in the Midterms (at least vis-a-vis suburban women), but this is going to continue to be their signature issue, as immigration is not popular.
Der Trumper would be a fool to cross Reichsfuhrer Mitch’s little deal with Dems on this, since Mitch’s Menagerie will be the ones keeping Trumpism afloat for the next 24 months. But since the very least you can say about Trumper is that he is an abject fool, he may decide to throw his temper tantrum. What the hell, right? He’s looking like shit right now anyway. It probably won’t be the last time that the Reichsfuhrer will have to defend a prez he thinks is an imbecile and who won’t listen to him. But if Mitch wants to control Trumper he has to start by, um, controlling him!
Obviously, the next two years are going to involve one conflagration after another, since Trumper despises everything about the country, its institutions, most of its people and the Congress. As his fortunes waned and the Bolshevik Russkis inexorably advanced, Hitler sought to bring the greatest level of destruction down on the “failed” German people–it was what they deserved for falling short of his greatness.
Similarly, Der Trumper’s goal will be to create chaos and disorder on a daily basis, and sell the idea that it’s all the result of the leftist Pelosi’s House of Socialism. Order can only be restored through a return to complete National Trumpalist control. Let the white minority-rule components of our failed system work overtime and hope for mass stupidity and ignorance to prevail. A long shot, but it’s about all our political criminal has left, that and his Trumpischer Beobachter: the Fox Propaganda network and rural Hate Radio(tm). The wild card will be the Reichsfuhrer’s attitude to the Trumpian chaos–a boon or burden to his (anti-democratic) “conservative” senate?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/235793/record-high-americans-say-immigration-good-thing.aspx
Link doesn’t work for me but found the article. Curious as midterm 2018 voters declared it to be the top “concern”. Presumably it could be the top concern of far less than a majority, so I will read more on this.
apologies for any factual error, but it surely won’t cause the slightest change in Repub behavior on the issue!
I just came back from a dimsum lunch with two visiting colleagues from Czech Republic. The usual topic of discussion was Trump.
It looks like there is quite a strong support among Czechs for Trump. One of them also has an appointment in UK, where he spends part of his academic year. He was saying that in sharp contrast there is little support for Trump in UK.
But then he switched back to saying that if the Theresa May government falls on Tuesday, then he was sure that Jeremy Corbyn would form the next government. And then both of them said that it would be a disaster because of Corbyn’s socialist views.
I am not that aware of UK politics, but what I took away from our conversation is that support for Trump remains strong in smaller European countries that are worried about immigration.
So what happens in 2019 with Pelosi as the speaker, they asked? They could not see any laws being passed.
I said the only thing that would pass would be the budgets, which after some compromise and negotiations, would be a must pass item.
There are still a lot of uncertain branching points – what happens with the SCO investigation? Does that affect the fate of Trump?
Who becomes the front runner for the D nominee? They asked about Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. I feel that the time is not judicious for a female candidate, much as I wish they would be the President. But it seems to me that a large enough fraction of white women are not ready yet to vote for a female candidate. So if the prize is to win the WH, it does not seem (at this early stage) a viable option.
Biden is too old. I said if Beto runs, then I could see myself supporting his candidacy. Some of what happens in 2019 and 2020 will depend on these factors!
At least in my mind, the D win in the midterms has not cleared up the picture of how this country moves in the next 2 years! I had not imagined that!!!
Sounds like an interesting lunch. The rest of the world seems riveted by our Trumper debacle. The Xceptional Nation(tm) run by an unqualified, thoroughly dishonest conman reprobate and degenerate, all through operation of an archaic, failed 18th century constitution that we haven’t the good sense to alter, or even discuss altering! It makes Louis XVI’s Ancien Regime seem like the glory days of the Roman Republic!
We know that anti-immigrant authoritarian politics are on the rise all across Europe, so they certainly aren’t immune from the global Trumpism epidemic. I have to say I doubt that a Czech Gallup would find a super-majority of Czechs supposedly finding increased immigration a “good thing”, haha! But I probably should google it first…
He has also a number of controversies dogging him. Earlier leaders of Czech have been climate science deniers, and also big supporters of Trump!
Yeah, that talking point.
Force that bigot to own up to his lies about the wall and remind his blind cult followers that he broke a promise with them, and that Mexico essentially told him to take hike.