I agree with Paul Waldman that the best way to end the government shutdown is for everyone to completely ignore President Trump. The House Democrats and the Senate Republicans should reach a compromise that allows the GOP to argue that they’ve strengthened the border and allows the Democrats to say that they’ve stood firm against paying for a wall that Trump assured us would be financed by the Mexican government. Then they should send this bill to Trump and dare him to veto it.
The Senate already voted 100-0 to keep the government open. The only reason the government is partially closed is that the House Republicans refused to hold a vote at all. With the Democrats taking over the House in January, the dynamic changes. A bill can be put on Trump’s desk.
The Senate Republicans might be reluctant to put Trump in that kind of jam, but they’re not going to keep the government closed forever just to appease him. And, in any case, there’s really no profit in trying to get Trump to agree to something in advance since he’s too mercurial to be trusted. He’s already burned the Senate once and disrupted their holiday plans by refusing to sign a bill they passed unanimously.
The partial shutdown has only been going on for a few days and it is already beginning to cause mayhem in the Department of Justice and our national parks. The Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo will close in a few days and the Environmental Protection Agency is out of money. Housing sales are getting held up because people can’t get flood insurance. And soon it will do severe damage to research and development.
The partial shutdown, caused by President Trump’s rejection of a bipartisan spending deal that did not allocate billions of dollars for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, curtailed scientific operations at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Agriculture Department, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey. Furloughed government scientists are prohibited from checking on experiments, performing observations, collecting data, conducting tests or sharing their results.
If the budget impasse extends into the new year, scientists say, it will harm critical research.
Eventually, the president will get a bill on this desk passed by veto-proof margins. That will happen sooner if Congress just ignores him from the outset.
The number of senators necessary to override Trump’s veto is exactly the number required to convict him and remove him from office.
Just sayin’.
It should be easier for them to vote to fund the government ( a heresy that will be forgotten long before the next election ), rather than voting to remove a sitting Republican president ( which won’t ).
If, after democrats take over and the Senate passes the same bill they approved of 100-0, and send it to Trump with a veto-proof margin, and they wake up the next day and see they’re still alive, then just maybe this will allow them begin to realize a political world without him, that they can get rid of Trump and survive that too.
I think the doubt is getting two thirds in the House, not the Senate.
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. . . ease of getting veto-proof bill onto Trump’s desk may be a tad unrealistic.
Trump doesn’t have the balls to veto. Call his bluff.
Along these lines the Dems could propose a ‘smart’ border, which doesn’t include a beaded curtain but does include enhanced border facilities to process the asylum seekers.
Does anyone else think it strange that DHS claimed that they arrested 2 MS13 gang members who confessed to traveling with the caravan before crossing the border illegally? Too many games being played by Nielsen.
If the Dems asked her process questions….How many were picked up illegally crossing yesterday? How many were children? She will not know and probably does not have anyone working for her that would know. She has no idea how many people she has lost track of. I think she knows the next hearing will be her last. She might even quit and make the Dems use a subpoena.
Kind of like the war in Iraq. When the Pentagon would issue reports that “20 insurgents were killed in fighting today” my brother once quipped, “How do we know they were insurgents? Do they have an I on their forehead?”
. . . they were Insurgents. By definition.
But even if that were true, so what? Two “gang members” were flagged at the border. Sounds like not only are the migrants predominantly law abiding people fleeing violence and seeking asylum, but that the systems we have in place now are effective in that regard.
The Trumpanzees want to have it both ways; at once they need a wall to prevent being overrun by hordes of poor and frightened migrants, while at the same time they have closed Obama’s open borders, just by virtue of Trump being president.
I guess we’ll soon return to the theory of the existence of some bloc of “moderate” House Repubs, because if they exist one would think it a simple matter for Pelosi to extend enough concessions to them to get a veto-proof shutdown-ender out of the House.
And with a prior senate effort at 100-0, it would seem there’s some appetite to kick Der Trumper’s fat ass even in Mitch’s Menagerie.
Otherwise, it will be clear that our country-hating Repubs will happily walk whatever plank Der Trumper orders, no matter how preposterous.
The difference, however, is that Trump had signaled a willingness to take the deal. So that made the 100-0 vote kind of a no-brainer for them. No risk at all, and they could just slide into the holiday with ease.
Now, not so much. They are going to have to step outside their comfort zone now. And that changes the whole landscape very dramatically. But they can now thumb their noses at the Freedom Caucus, if they wish. It is hard to tell how that will work out for them.
I’m struggling mightily to wrap my head around the insanity and waste of forbidding scientists to even check on their experiments. The Republicans really really hate science.
. . . somebody already beat you to it.
Unfortunately, this isn’t even the first time this has happened.
Was happy to see Pelosi/Dems citing precisely that fact for why they aren’t currently engaged in any negotiations. Keep this all on him!
Sen Mitt Romney is going to be an interesting new wheel.
You think so? By the middle of next year, I expect he’ll look more like a Mario Rubio Republican than a Jeff Flake Republican (not that Flake was ever much more than a scold).
Well the Senate bill passed 100-0 so if Pelosi simply sends that through the House, it should be more than done.
Trump vetoing would prove he owns the shutdown. More than 30 Republicans would have to flip their own votes to if they wanted to support him and keep the government closed, and then they would own it too.
. . . means all new bills, starting from zero, iirc. So they could just re-introduce that bill with 2019 on it, but both Senate and House would each have to send it all the way through the sausage-making apparatus again from scratch.
….
Sure seems like Pelosi is thinking along these lines. In any case, I don’t think Senate Republicans would want to be in the position of explaining why the exact language they approved in late December was suddenly unacceptable in January. Voters don’t have much patience for the fine print of Senate rules.
I give about a 90% chance that the first thing Pelosi will do is gavel through McConnell’s stopgap by a voice vote in about 15 minutes. Then the ball will be in McConnell’s court and she will move on to other things like the proposed honest government bills.
. . . just take the bill Senate passed 100-0 THIS Congress, pass it NEXT Congress, and send it to Trump to sign or not. Has to start over in both Houses. They could start over with identical text in the new bill to the one that passed, but they’d have to start over with a new bill. The 100-0 passage in the Senate of the previous Congress does not carry over to the new Congress. The Senate would have to re-approve (and the House approve), even if the new bill consisted of the identical text to the one that passed in the previous Congress.
I know it will have to go back to the Senate, which is why I said the ball would be in McConnell’s court. That said, as other posters have pointed out here and elsewhere, it’s awkward for McConnell to refuse to allow a vote on a short-term appropriation bill that passed the previous Senate unanimously and if McConnell allows a vote it will almost certainly end up in Trump’s lap in turn rather quickly.
The whole point of a continuing resolution is to keep the government running while members of Congress haggle over policy. That’s why the Senate unanimously approved it. Trump rejected it, which is why he gets the blame for shutting the government down. If Pelosi submits the same language and McConnell decides to reject it, then the whole Republican party owns the shutdown, not just Trump.
It’s hard to convince people that we’ve got a national threat at the border when you’re refusing to pay the border patrol.
Short term CR? Or make it say six months?
Just heard short discussion on tv. Three options being considered. First short term, second until end of fiscal year in Sep and third Cr leaving Homeland Security out.
. . . it’s exactly what Democratic Party Leader Pelosi and her forces should be trying to make happen. Gotta note again, though, the very large and consequential difference between
and
The ease and likelihood of the latter seeming to me to be a wee bit over-optimistically over-estimated in some quarters recently.
Along which lines: I responded “Not how it works” initially to the proposition that
Then to the suggestion that I had that wrong. I don’t think I had that wrong.
when it wants to get something done.
. . . (though that’s of course the issue with a divided Congress; can’t just handwave it away). But irrelevant to the requirement that a New Congress must start over with a fresh, new bill (even if its text is identical to one passed in the previous Congress), the House can’t just pass a bill the Senate passed in the previous Congress and send it off to the president* — not even if it passed 100-0.
*or Trump in the absence of a legitimately elected president in this case.
Put the deal on his desk and compel him to sign it. Trump lies all the time. Trump makes deals and then backs out of them or doesn’t pay his end of the deal. This has been his business model for his entire career after all. He’s a cheap crook, nothing more and certainly not someone you can deal with.
2/3 majority is all Schumer needs to cut out Trump’s veto.
Keep the government closed until the Democratic House passes a bill.
Non-political Americans need a lesson in which parties are which.
Passing any bill that opens the government now makes it 100% the Democrats fault next time it gets shut down.