Ryan Lizza reports that there are people in the White House who seem strangely exhilerated about the prospect of a government shutdown battle:
While the potential for a government shutdown has been overshadowed by other events—Syria, North Korea, the attempted repeal of Obamacare—the Trump White House is suddenly seized with the issue. “Next week is going to have quite high drama,” a top White House official, who sounded excited by the coming clash, told me. “It’s going to be action-packed. This one is not getting as much attention, but, trust me, it’s going to be the battle of the titans. And the great irony here is that the call for the government shutdown will come on—guess what?—the hundredth day. If you pitched this in a studio, they would say, ‘Get out of here, it’s too ridiculous.’ This is going to be a big one.”
I don’t know who Lizza is talking to, but he definitely sounds like a moron:
But it’s not just the Democrats who oppose several Trump priorities. Congressional Republicans, who are generally united in support for the increase in defense spending, are divided on the border wall, which is not popular among border-state Republicans, and the deep domestic-spending cuts.
So far, it does not look like a bridgeable gap. “This is going to be high-stakes poker,” the White House official said. When I asked if a shutdown was likely, the official paused for several seconds. “I don’t know,” the official said. The official added, “I just want my wall and my ice agents.”
It looks like the White House and congressional Republicans are about to have a Come-to-Jesus moment about the nature of reality. It’s a bit of a role reversal from the Obama years when it was the congressional Republicans who kept making impossible demands and insisting on doomed strategies. Now it’s going to fall on them to explain to the White House that they’re out of their fucking minds.
