It was a relatively slow day on the Sunday shows. No doubt most of the House and Senate was too tuckered out from the shutdown to pipe up with the incendiary early-morning statements that would usually be good for a few days of fundraising-friendly outrage.
Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi dived in front of a camera yet again, this time to tell CNN host Jack Tapper that the information contained in the Stone indictment about him is indeed "accurate" and that he will testify to it in court, including the Stone request for him to obtain information about future Wikileaks releases. Roger Stone, for his part, appeared on a rival show to vow that he too would "testify honestly", while grousing about the special counsel's "ability to induce [other] people to say things that are not true."
But both of those people are inveterate liars who you cannot trust any farther than you could throw, and so literally not a word of that is useful information, much less "news." Not a bit of it. At this point television bookers appear to be inviting both of them on the airwaves based solely on a hope that they will tell a lie so egregious that they burst into television-friendly flames.
So it fell to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to fill America's growling news-hole, and the man tried his best to deliver.
Less than 48 hours after President Trump signed legislation ending the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said the president would have no problem doing it again when funding is due to dry up again in three weeks.
Two days. It took two days of a re-opened government for the White House chief of staff to affirm that Trump was willing to own the next shutdown, as well as the last one. There's no reason to believe that this would work out any better for the White House than the last time; one might even imagine federal workers, with back pay replenished but a stinging memory of just how willing Trump was to use them as his hostages, might not have half as much patience during an attempted sequel. But Mulvaney likely knows that there is no way to dodge Trump taking credit for a second shutdown, if it happens, so there is no point in pretending otherwise.
Mulvaney also declined to rule out going the constitutional crisis route, declaring a "national emergency" to soothe Trump's bruised ego, if Democrats were not willing to give him billions of dollars for a boondoggle even the most toadying of Republican-led Congresses would not. The message of the day: All options for fouling our government remain on the table, if the pouting dotard does not get his way.
