We’ll have a variety of views today on the topic with no consensus. In the frenetic chaos of Trump news cycle, it feels a little like old news already. But here’s my pro tip:
- When you're in the majority, pass good policy, get reelected
- When you're in the minority, get elected, then pass good policy.
It has to be in that order. For us, see second bullet.
And yes, DC is moving on, to the Robert Mueller interviews. More on that below.
Gideon Resnick/Daily Beast:
THIS COULD GET UGLY
Immigration Activists Are About to Go Off on Chuck Schumer
“We're targeting Dems who voted for this CR (continuing resolution),” Angel Padilla, policy director for Indivisible, a resistance organization formed in response to Trump’s presidency, told The Daily Beast. “They sold out Dreamers. They failed to stand up to Trump's white supremacy. They had the support of the grassroots and they caved. It also demonstrates that Democrats remain terrified of immigration. And they will continue to run from it.”
But elsewhere in the immigration advocacy community the notion that Democrats should be targeted during this critical, three week juncture is, at best, harebrained and at worst counterproductive. Schumer, as one top advocate noted, got his entire caucus behind the DREAM Act—no small feat considering the moderate members he has up for re-election. And the only reason he voted to reopen the government is because many of those moderates had forced his hand into doing so by saying they’d back McConnell’s measure.
“Schumer here wasn’t the problem,” the advocate said, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to incur the wrath of his contemporaries. “Schumer was holding his ground on this. It was the moderates who undercut the leader.”
Hans Noel is a co-author of The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform
In other words, it’s a complicated issue that (among other issues like domestic vs military spending) has held up the government having a formal budget.
Here's the dirty truth about the shutdown: minority parties have a lot less leverage than majority parties, even when it comes to doing the right thing. Feeling powerless? Don’t just complain about what minority party D’s do and don’t do, work towards Nov 2018, with specials along the way.
David Leonhardt/NY Times:
But it’s just not the case that a minority party can force the majority party to do what it wants if only it summons enough righteous anger. It never has been. It’s another version of the Green Lantern Theory of politics — that if you care enough and try hard enough, you can do anything.
The best hope for the Dreamers was not a shutdown that was somehow supposed to end differently from every other recent shutdown. The best hope, first, is to see if there is a solution over the next few weeks, away from the chaos and heat of a shuttered federal government.
If that doesn’t work, there is only one reliable way to change a policy that the majority party won’t change: Turn that party into the minority party.
I wrote my similar opinion before I read Leonhardt’s. But he’s right.
Best balanced piece I’ve seen on shutdown (something for everyone to like/hate) is from James Hohmann/WaPo:
Seven takeaways from the failed Democratic government shutdown
Many Republicans think the federal government isn’t just a problem, but a leviathan that needs to be slain. Democrats, in contrast, believe that government is a force for good, and party leaders see it as their solemn duty to deliver services. They see themselves as “afflicted,” as Hillary Clinton likes to say, “with the responsibility gene.”
That’s partly why it took Republicans two weeks to cave when they shut down the federal government in 2013, but Democrats could only hold out for two full days when they tried it. Their ploy failed as vulnerable incumbents and pillars of the party’s governing wing got cold feet, forcing leaders to blink.
The doomed-to-fail strategy was reminiscent of Air America, the radio channel that was created by the left during the George W. Bush era to try to out-Rush-Limbaugh Rush Limbaugh. Not only can that not be done, it wasn’t really what the base wanted. They hated Bush, but lefties also temperamentally yearn for inclusion, civility and dialogue.
Not everyone thinks it’s a cave. For example:
Ezra Klein/Vox:
Democrats didn’t cave on the shutdown
Democrats are funding CHIP for six years and reopening the government without losing their shutdown leverage.
Democratic opponents of the deal believe that an extended shutdown increases the likelihood of a DREAMer compromise. But does it? That is to say that an extended shutdown will cause Trump so much political or personal pain that he will accept one of the immigration compromises he has thus far rejected. Neither dynamic is obvious to me.
Politically, Trump’s entire brand is anti-immigration politics, and if there is round-the-clock news coverage of a shutdown over immigration, he’ll think it’s good for his base. Personally, Trump’s goal in life is to be seen as a winner, and to double down when attacked or under pressure, and so it’s hard to see how a high-stakes battle over a shutdown — which would make a deal on immigration look like a cave to reopen the government by Trump — helps.
Matt Fuller/Huffington Post:
The Case For The Democratic ‘Cave’
It’s not really a cave if you’re just continuing the fight.
If ― as progressives were happy to tweet Monday ― Democrats shouldn’t trust McConnell, forcing him to make more explicit promises on the Senate floor, promises that will surely be thrown back in his face should he fail to live up to them and there is another shutdown, that isn’t to be taken for granted. And if the Senate were able to pass a bipartisan DACA bill, while also demonstrating that a more conservative DACA bill currently making its way through the House doesn’t have the votes in the Senate, they make it much easier to argue that it’s Republicans like Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) who are shutting down the government by not giving Democrats a vote in the House.
The Democratic position of not voting for a government funding bill until there’s a DACA deal seems much more reasonable if there’s actual legislation that’s passed the Senate and is being ignored in the House. You’d be certain to hear the words, “Give us a vote, Mr. Speaker!”
The reality of this shutdown standoff is that it’s hardly over
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
The shutdown highlights two of the biggest threats to democracy
Whether it’s his desire to please whomever he is addressing, total confusion, lack of interest in the substance of governing or inability to focus (or all of the above) can be debated. The reality is that even worse than the Trump U swindle, the promise Trump as a businessman would do great deals was egregiously false labeling. If there is a deal, it will be because one was presented to him after others negotiated it. Michael Wolff’s portrait of Trump as a useless man-child marched around by aides seems have been on point.
The second and arguably more distressing phenomenon is the degree to which the Trump team refuses to separate partisan politics from the operation of government. It is as if the Hatch Act — which prohibits politics while on the job serving the American people — has been replaced by the Trump Act: Make everything a nasty partisan exercise and charge the taxpayers.
Given that everyone hates a shutdown, those are not bad numbers. If we think Trump 39% approval is low, we also think 39% D disapproval is low. 56% blame R’s which is the correct answer. But no one wins in a shutdown.
Jamie Dupree/AJC:
Democrats also acknowledged that to get a bill through the Senate, they will need 60 votes to overcome any filibuster – and that means they will have to compromise with Republicans, and likely give in on some immigration matters.
One uncertainty at this point is how DACA recipients should be dealt with.
Under the bipartisan plan which has already been rejected by the White House, the “Dreamers” would have a path to citizenship – but it would take them 12 years to get to that point.
But for a lot of Republicans – especially in the House – any pathway to possible citizenship is a non-starter, as many GOP lawmakers say will not accept anything that looks like “amnesty.”
“There is a deal to be made,” said House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) of immigration. “But in my mind, that would not include amnesty.”
Crooks and Liars:
"What do you want me to tell the crazy women talking about justice? They ignored us again but they will not ignore us at the ballot box," [Linda] Sarsour said.
"This is right. This is symptomatic, the marches and the activism is not taken seriously. Why?" Traister asked.
"They are women's marches. We know last year single biggest one-day demonstration in this country's history, we heard how afterwards, it was okay but just a march, it's performance, fun, people get together and wear their cute hats, whatever. No one seems to have connected, still, a year later when there is a spontaneous demonstration almost the same size in some places like Chicago, bigger, without a centralized organization drawing everybody.
"I didn't know about the marches," she said. "I write about women and politics. I didn't know there would be women's marches until January and they were massive. They don't just have cute marches with the hats with the fact it's women clogging congressional phone lines and doing town halls, who have been organizing on the grassroots activist level around state and local office races around the country who have been winning in New Jersey, in Virginia and who are running in unprecedented numbers for the House, for the Senate and primarying Democrats from the left.
"And apparently, the media's failure to take this seriously as a political movement and not as some social weekend thing that women do once a year, has led Senate Democrats to think it's not a serious political movement," she said.
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
It’s looking more and more like Jeff Sessions is doing Trump’s political dirty work
But there are increasing signs that Sessions has indeed done plenty of Trump's bidding behind closed doors. And he's done it on some dicey and very politically tinged issues — so much so that he made Trump's second FBI director deeply uncomfortable with the whole thing.
The Post's Devlin Barrett and Philip Rucker report that Sessions has pressured FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to get rid of his deputy Andrew McCabe, a holdover from James B. Comey's FBI and favorite target for Republicans alleging bias in federal law enforcement. Some have reported that Wray even threatened to resign; The Post is reporting that he did not explicitly do so.
Jeet Heer/TNR:
The Triumph of Porn Over Social Conservatism
Why Trump's alleged affairs with erotic stars aren't hurting him on the right
tl;dr? It’s the patriarchy, stupid. Lording it over subservient women is cool if that’s all you got anymore, apparently. And cross off right and substitute evangelicals.