Shutting Down The Government Was A Disastrous Mistake For Trump-- I Hope Weak-Knee-ed Freshman Dems Don't Wave The White Flag While He's Surrounded

Anyone think that the 3 week plan to halt the Trump-McConnell shutdown 'til after the Super Bowl is going to work out? Pelosi was able to force him to agree to "temporarily reopen the government while talks continue on his demand for border wall money, handing Democrats a major victory in the protracted standoff... "If a 'fair deal' does not emerge by Feb. 15, Trump said, there could be another government shutdown or he could declare a national emergency, a move that could allow him to direct the military to build the wall without congressional consent. Such an action would likely face an immediate legal challenge."

On Wednesday afternoon, the House passed H.R. 648, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2019 which-- if passed by the Senate and signed by Trump, would fund the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Justice, science-related agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of the Treasury, the judiciary, the Executive Office of the President, the District of Columbia, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service, the Department of State, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It passed 234 to 180.

Only 10 Republicans had the guts to break with McCarthy and Trump to cross the aisle and vote to pass it without tacking on money for Trump's vanity wall. This is the list-- alongside the percentage of votes each got in their November reelection contests:

• Brian Fitzpatrick (PA)- 51.3%
• Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA)- 52.7%
• Will Hurd (TX)- 49.2%
• John Katko (NY)- 52.6%
• Adam Kinzinger (IL)- 59.1%
• Michael Simpson (ID)- 60.7%
• Chris Smith (NJ)- 55.4%
• Elise Stefanik (NY)- 56.1%
• Fred Upton (MI)- 50.2%
• Greg Walden (OR)- 56.3%

A few minutes earlier, the House rejected the Republicans' Motion to Recommit, a distraction from the Democrats' attempt to open the government. Every Republican voted for it. 215 Democrats voted against it and 10 Democrats, mostly on the right-fringe of the party voted with the Republicans. Remembering their names will help you define the 116th Congress' potential bad boys as we start seeing vote patterns develop. Mostly freshmen, they were led by two of the worst corrupt conservatives in the Democratic Party, Wall Street whore Josh Gottheimer and careerist nothingburger Conor "Lost Little" Lamb.

• Joe Cunningham (SC)- 50.6%
• Sharice Davids (New Dem-KS)- 53.6%
• Antonio Delgado (NY)- 51.4%
• Jared Golden (ME)- 50.6%
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)- 56.2%
• Conor Lamb (PA)- 56.3%
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)- 50.1%
• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)- 53.0%
• Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM)- 50.9%
• Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)- 52.9%

How embarrassing is it that Trump's Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, slime-ball billionaire whose negligence in a coal mining enterprise once killed a dozen miners, doesn't understand why furloughed federal workers need food banks. He didn't ask why they can't eat cake. He asked why they can't take out bridge loans.



And this right on top of Fox News reporting that more voters say the Trump-McConnell government shutdown is a bigger problem than Trump's nonsensical border emergency: 75% vs 59%.

Reporting for Bloomberg News, Joshua Green wrote yesterday that the Trump-McConnell shutdown is not only dragging on longer and causing more economic damage, it’s also resisting the usual forces of resolution.

From the beginning, the Trump-led shutdown over a border wall has been different. It effectively kicked off on live television when Trump staged a showdown with incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and was then gulled into taking responsibility for what was about to happen. “I will be the one to shut it down,” Trump boasted to a grinning Schumer. “I’m not going to blame you for it.”

When government funding expired at midnight on Dec. 21, CNN and MSNBC rolled out the usual “shutdown clock” and reporters scrambled to find victims—not hard when 800,000 federal workers have had their paychecks halted. Furloughed workers and their families are lining up for whole city blocks to collect donated groceries. From airports to federal prisons, absenteeism is soaring. “This is uncharted territory, and with increased callouts citing financial hardship, this could have a compounding effect and force contingency plans at airports nationwide,” says Michael Bilello, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration.

The economic damage has begun to register, too. The shutdown has crimped forecasts across Wall Street and brought on “emerging headwinds” that New York Federal Reserve President John Williams says could shave a full percentage point from first-quarter growth. The University of Michigan’s latest consumer sentiment index dropped to the lowest level of Trump’s presidency. Even the White House is sounding an alarm. Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, who initially likened the furloughs to “a vacation” that would leave workers “better off,” reversed track on Jan. 15 and said the council’s own estimates show the stalemate reducing growth by 0.13 percentage point for each week it drags on. A week later, he warned of zero growth if the crisis extends through March. “If the government shutdown continues,” said Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank, “it could cause a recession.”

Despite all this, Trump doesn’t sound as if he’s about to relent. His poll numbers have worsened, but not dramatically. Members of Congress feel no compunction about leaving town. The president apparently even exhausted the cable news industry’s capacity to sustain a ratings-boosting atmosphere of alarm: CNN’s shutdown clock has vanished, while MSNBC, loath to give up entirely on a crisis that should be hurting the president, has swapped its clock for a more sedate calendar.

There can be no question we’ve passed into what a recent Goldman Sachs note calls “an era of political polarization, uncertainty, and dysfunction.” With Trump’s presidency entering Year 3, that hardly seems like breaking news. But as this crisis indicates, the dysfunction is different now. The virus has mutated.

There are two main reasons this shutdown has become a little scary-- and together they should cause us to shift our appraisal of U.S. politics to something even more dire than it was before the showdown began. The first way this shutdown is distinct is that the president himself engineered it. Previous ones were always forced by the legislative branch to try to extract concessions-- legal status for immigrants, reduced health-care spending-- from a president of the opposing party. Such hostage-taking usually proved futile and ended in disappointment.

...As the late economist Herbert Stein famously remarked, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” At some point, the standoff will end because the economic damage will compound to an unbearable point. For all its symbolism, Trump’s shutdown has always been a big fight over a small number-- the $5.7 billion he’s demanding for his wall is about one-tenth of 1 percent of the total federal budget.

Whatever the resolution, whenever it comes, it shouldn’t obscure the alarming dysfunction the standoff has exposed. Nor should the future implications go unheeded. In the past, the party that forced a shutdown always relented when the broad middle turned against it. Trump has already broken this mold, since, on the matter of a U.S. taxpayer-funded border wall, he never had the middle to begin with. He’s not acting at the behest of his party, either. Senate Republicans already voted unanimously to fund the government without wall money and went weak-kneed only at his insistence. Rather, Trump’s decision to close the government was driven by a desire to fortify his self-image as someone able to bend Washington to his will on the matter of greatest importance to his staunchest supporters: immigration. The fallout of this Fox News fantasy doesn’t appear to weigh on him.

Perhaps he’ll manage to secure funding by agreeing in the end to the obvious deal of trading DACA protections for it. But what if he doesn’t? Does anyone imagine Trump will be satisfied to run for reelection with his central promise unfulfilled? Or will he seek out a new point of leverage, one that Democrats can’t exploit as easily as the current shutdown?

On March 1 the U.S. debt ceiling will be reinstated. By late summer the Treasury Department’s “extraordinary measures” will be exhausted and the government’s borrowing authority will run out. House Democrats have already changed their rules to make raising the debt ceiling easier. But ultimately, it’s up to Trump. Let’s say he’s forced to make a humiliating climbdown in the current impasse. What’s to stop him from, say, refusing to raise the debt limit without wall funding in return?

It wouldn’t be fear of alienating centrist voters, or damaging political norms, or making a move that’s economically counterproductive, as the free traders in his administration can wearily attest. Maybe a plunge in the Dow causes him to relent. Or maybe it doesn’t. Every day that the current stalemate drags on is a new measure of Trump’s stubborn force of will-- and a reminder that the old safeguards no longer apply.