Chuck Schumer now owns the shutdown

So, if the Democrats don't pass the CR, doesn't that pretty much leave Trump in charge of figuring out what's essential?

And maybe do a "deferred resignation" at the same time providing that anyone who agrees to deferred resignation will receive pay for time without CR, but no one else will.



:evilnod:
 
Schumer wants 30 days to "renegotiate," yet they have had a year to do this. Let the Democrats own the shutdown. I didn't want to go to a national park anyway.
 
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Thanks to the new Hypocrisy-2025, Senate Democrats have time-traveled to a new era where shutting down the government is "brave" and "for the people." Scientists are baffled. Voters aren't.
 
The Right has always played with shutdowns. It is their hammer because Dems know what damage a shutdown would do. The Trumpys do not care. What would a 30-day period to talk about a deal do? Why it would stop the shutdown. Can you understand that much?
 
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Democrats haven’t even surrendered yet on a government shutdown — but already White House officials are gloating about making them eat crow, almost taunting them to vote “no.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threw down the gauntlet Wednesday, proclaiming that Republicans don’t have the 60 votes needed to keep the government open past Friday. But President Donald Trump and senior White House officials are increasingly confident Schumer will release enough centrists to put up the votes for passage, according to multiple White House officials I spoke to over the past 24 hours.

They’re 100 percent gonna swallow it,” one White House official told me. “They’re totally screwed.”

Many lawmakers in both parties are privately predicting that some sort of deal will be reached in which Senate Democrats get amendment votes in return for allowing the House-passed “continuing resolution” to advance and ultimately pass.

Still, that’s not a done deal. And given the intense pressure from the base to flip Trump the bird, there’s still plenty of time for Democrats to back away from a possible deal before Friday’s deadline.

In some ways the administration looks like it’s almost itching for a shutdown and daring Democrats to touch the stove.

Last month, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought notably gave agencies until Thursday to submit plans for “large-scale reductions in force.” The details could spill out hours before a shutdown and would almost certainly agitate the Democratic base even further.

What’s more, Republicans felt confident enough to pass the so-called “CR” with a few provisions favorable to them.

Those included increasing spending for defense and deportations, while making small cuts elsewhere and handcuffing Democrats’ ability to force votes on Trump’s controversial tariff policies.

In some ways, the White House’s posture smacks of over-confidence bordering on arrogance. During most face-offs like this — when an administration needs the votes of the opposition party for must-pass legislation — there’s typically some sort of outreach, even by the president himself.

Not so with Trump. Instead of extending an olive branch this week, the president used his Oval Office bilateral meeting with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin to attack Schumer in vicious personal terms, saying he’s “no longer Jewish” and calling him a Palestinian.

And despite the fact that they need eight Senate Democrats to back this measure for passage, the White House hasn’t bothered to contact any so far.

The reason is simple: Trump and the GOP win this shutdown fight either way.

While Vice President JD Vance privately told House Republicans this week that the GOP would be blamed in a shutdown since they control everything, the remarks appear to have been more of an attempt to rally GOP lawmakers to vote for the CR rather than a reflection of how the administration actually views the political landscape.

On the contrary, White House officials predicted to me that while Elon Musk has gotten flack for dismissing tens of thousands of workers, it’s the Democrats who will take the blame for more than 2 million federal employees getting furloughed, tax returns getting slowed and other benefits and programs getting shuttered if a shutdown occurs. (Which, full disclosure, I’ve been suggesting for weeks.)

“The margin we put up in the House, they completely own it if they shut down the government. And if they do shut down … they’ll get colossally murdered for it,” the official mentioned above said. “It was an epic jam.”

There’s another reason the White House isn’t sweating a shutdown: Senior officials agree that when coffers run dry, the Trump administration — specifically Vought, the longtime cost-cutting conservative now running OMB — would have unprecedented flexibility to choose which agencies get to stay open and which don’t.

There’s truth to this, as I wrote in a column last month, where I first argued to Democrats that the shutdown fight isn’t the leverage point they think it is.

As I noted then, it was actually a federal bureaucrat who in 1980 laid out the modern-day terms of how to operate during a shutdown — and thus a federal bureaucrat (maybe one named, say, Vought or Musk) could upend those rules and re-write them to his own benefit.

It’s not hard to see Musk getting out his chainsaw and Vought finding a hammer.

“Musk in charge of furloughs in a shutdown? He’d be giddy. He’d be beside himself with joy,” the official joked.

A Democrat-triggered shutdown would be tough for the party for another reason as well: For weeks they’ve been lambasting Trump and Musk for tearing apart the government.

Democrats in a shutdown would effectively have to argue that they’re trying to protect the government by shutting down the government.

Good luck making that argument to anyone outside the Democrat base.










 
Here's @SenAdamSchiff in 2023 lamenting that if government shut down, employees "would've not gotten their paychecks" and "service members in the military would be forced to go to work and not get paid." Now, he and his fellow Democrats are threatening a shutdown.









View: https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1900202783493492939
The threat of a shutdown is from the Reds. They have the fucking majority in the House and Senate. Is that hard for you to comprehend?
 
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