Trump And Ryan Can't Even Keep The Government Open, Though The GOP Controls Every Aspect Of Government

Wednesday, the editors of the Boston Globe reminded their readers who are thinking about the government shutdown Trump seems to be engineering for tomorrow-- and pre-blaming on Democrats-- that "the Republican Party controls both houses of Congress and the presidency. If its leaders can’t keep the government’s lights on, despite unified control of Washington, it would be an unnerving commentary on the GOP’s ability to handle the most basic tasks of governing... Anticipating the public backlash, Trump and some other Republicans are trying to divert blame to the minority Democrats. It’s an odd tactic. It’s true that many Democrats want no part of any deal unless it includes a separate proposal to protect the children of undocumented immigrants from deportation. But the Democrats don’t run Congress."

Tuesday night Ryan and his team decided to start waving the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) under the noses of Democrats-- 6 years worth of renewal funds-- to try to get their support after the far right extremists of their own party, primarily members of the neo-fascist Freedom Caucus, said they won't back keeping the government open. The Democrats, however, want a DACA fix in the bill, something in-house White house fascist Stephen Miller has persuaded Trump to oppose.

North Carolina Nazi Mark Meadows bragged this week that "based on the number of noes and undecideds in the Freedom Caucus, there’s not enough support to pass it with just GOP support in the House." In the kind of deep, deep red district that Meadows and other Nazis represent, primarily in the South, where no independents are needed for elections, no one cares who gets blamed for a shutdown in swing districts held by Republicans top north. And new polling shows that Trump and the GOP will be blamed, despite all the Trump tweets and despite Fox-- all preaching to the neo-fascist choir. The Hart Research poll found that "even before hearing any specific policy disagreements," 42% of Americans would blame Señor Trumpanzee and congressional Republicans for a government shutdown, with just 31% instinctively laying the blame at the feet of the Democrats, a significant 11-point margin.

Among independents and undecided voters, the margin is even wider, as independents would blame Republicans over Democrats by a 16-point margin and self-described undecided 2018 voters would blame the GOP over Democrats by a 19-point margin.

The poll included interviews with adults in 12 Senate battleground states: Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Of the respondents, 52 percent reported having voted for the president and 41 percent for Hillary Clinton, a margin crafted intentionally to closely mirror the combined average results from those 12 states in the 2016 election.

Republicans headed into the new year hoping to spend much of 2018 touting the passage of Trump's signature tax bill. Further, many Republicans up for election in November hoped to use its passage as a main campaign tool. But a government shutdown would likely draw the focus of voters away from the tax legislation and instead toward Washington dysfunction and a blame game over who is responsible for the government shutdown.

Paul Ryan's opponent in WI-01, Randy "IronStache" Bryce is a common sense kind of guy. "Basic math," he told me today, "would normally be used to show who has a majority in every branch of the U.S. government. It’s one of the few things left that can’t be considered 'fake.' Funniest part about this entire finger pointing session has the 'Freedom Caucus' is the group creating the havoc. Please clean up your own yard before telling others to look after theirs."

Politico reporting by Kyle Cheney and Elana Schor backs this up. There sources? Beltway Republicans. Like South Carolina Republican Mark Sanford: "The perception of most Republicans is that a shutdown does not accrue to Republican benefit. It’s a relatively tough sale. It makes it that much harder for Democrats to acquiesce on a deal because they feel like they have the upper hand."

During the 17-day shutdown of 2013, “the Republican Party’s favorable rating dropped 10 points in a matter of days, and it took a year to fully recover,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster. “It would take an act of extraordinary political agility to avoid a similar fate today.”

This year, Democrats hold none of Washington’s levers of power, but their central goal in the immigration talks-- protections for undocumented individuals brought to the country as minors-- is viewed favorably by bipartisan majorities. Trump is mired in low approval ratings, even in battleground states he won in 2016, as he pushes for more money for the border wall he promised on the campaign trail.

And new polling suggests voters are already poised to blame Republicans if talks go awry. A poll released Tuesday by the Democratic-leaning firm Hart Research Associates found 81 percent of voters in a dozen Trump-leaning states supportive of adding aid to the undocumented Dreamers to any government funding bill.

That leaves Democrats with a significant strategic advantage, knowing that Republicans need their votes to keep the government open and would have trouble laying blame for a shutdown in their laps.

This is the kind of thing that makes me scoff when Beltway types warn that the election is still 10 months away and that everything could change and the Republicans could retain control of Congress, etc. Sure, it is 10 months away...  but the most likely changes to the zeitgeist are that the likelihood of Democrats winning between 50 and 60 House seats will increase to 75-80 House seats. That deep, deep red Wisconsin state Senate seat that flipped Tuesday wasn't just a fluke-- and the Republican who went down in flames was no Roy Moore. This was a response from rural GOP-leaning voters to Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Scott Walker. And this is what a nascent tsunami looks like 10 months out. One would have to be out of one's mind to imagine that Trump isn't going to make things even worse for his party between now and November-- and that the voters are going to do anything other than grow increasingly furious at his Republican enablers in Congress. Shutting down the government is going to further erode GOP support among independents and moderates, even if the lunatic opioid-and-Fox addicts who back Trump whine about Pelosi on cue.

Derrick Crowe is running for Congress in an Austin/San Antonio district that Trump won by 10 points-- much closer than the 26 points Trump won the Wisconsin state Senate district that flipped red to blue on Tuesday. And like that Wisconsin Senate district, TX-21 is an open seat, Lamar Smith having decided to get out before the voters kick him out. Derrick seemed incredulous at the bickering inside the GOP over their inability to keep the government funded and running. "This is a total and complete failure to govern by the GOP," he said. "They've managed to pass a tax scam that gives corporations and billionaires big paybacks for political donations, but they can't get their act together to reauthorize CHIP or keep the government operating at any basic level. That's because this administration was never intended to be a true government. It's a smash-and-grab job, plain and simple. They've handed federal departments to oligarch accomplices for the sole purpose of breaking them or using them to enrich themselves and their friends. But when the government shuts down, the people are going to rise up for the political revolution."

Jenny Marshall is also running for Congress-- and in a tougher district than Derrick's. But-- with hard work and persistence-- it's a winnable district in this wave cycle and she's running against a bona fide villain, the proudly bigoted Virginia Foxx. "Virginia Foxx, Mark Meadows and the GOP," she told us this morning, are fully responsible if our government shuts down. For the past year they have controlled all three branches of our government and they still cannot figure out how to govern. They had to cram the tax plan through in the dead of night with notes scribbled in the margins with little debate and no negotiation with the Democrats. This is no way to govern. Now the Republicans need the Democrats and we must stand firm in our commitments to children on CHIP and a fix to DACA. Under no certain terms should one take precedence over the other. We are talking about the lives of people in both instances and two issues that the American people want to see fixed/funded. We should and must push for both of these to be passed. If the Republicans want to avoid a shutdown, then they will actually remember what Congress is supposed to do...debate, negotiate and compromise. That would be responsible governance."

Antoinette Sedillo Lopez is running in a nice blue New Mexico district. Her wisdom, experience and energy will do a lot of good in a Congress that has grown more and more dysfunctional and ineffective. She told me that "the current shut-down crisis is an outrageous level of dysfunction. The Republican party has been unified by hate and bigotry when it comes to the subject of immigrant communities, and they have betrayed working families by allowing CHIP funding to lapse. They run the federal government-- both houses of Congress and the White House are in Republican hands-- and they own this shutdown. The President reneged on his commitment to DREAMers, and the right-wing Republican Congress is complicit. And, disturbingly, to a law professor like me, is the failure of this Republican controlled Congress to serve its constitutional role as a check and balance to an out of control executive branch of government. Instead, they fail to even keep the government going. A bold and drastic change is needed. I expect a blue tsunami as long as voters know what is going on."