Government shutdown
Posted: Sat Jan 20, 2018 9:08 am
Congress and the President are unable to agree on a federal budget, so the government has shut down. Is America great again yet?
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/ ... ump-352222
The sad thing is, by all accounts the Ds and Rs had come up with a bipartisan budget compromise that would have prevented the government from shutting down. And the President said at a meeting that he'd sign whatever the people on the committee agreed on. But they brought it to him and he shot it down.
Having such a volatile and capricious President undermines the ability of the already heavily polarized parties from being able to find common ground and compromise.
It is also important to remember that the two issues the Dems are fighting for here, DACA and CHIP, both have the following important properties:
- Both of them were existing Obama policies that Tr*mp went out of his way to cancel, defund, or lapse.
- Both could easily be put up for a vote in the House and Senate if they wanted to.
- In polling, both have clear bipartisan majorities of support and would pass.
But instead, the GOP has intentionally let these important programs lapse without voting on them so that they could save them until these budget negotiations, so that they could use them as political leverage against the Dems.
The way that this current administration tries to get you to "compromise" is roughly the following: take away something crucial; make you give them something hateful (wall, deportations, benefit cuts, etc.) in order to get the crucial thing back; blame you for not "compromising" if you don't.
This government shutdown hurts real people. Food stamps and other benefits stop going out, for example. National parks close. Lots of other services just stop. Every day that DACA is lapsed, there are people getting deported. Every day that CHIP has no funding, there will be children unable to get life-saving medicine. People will literally die because of this petty BS.
The administration hollowly claims that they want a "merit-based" immigration system. The immigrants who are part of DACA have demonstrated ample merit: They have jobs, educations, they work, they pay taxes, they are required to have zero criminal record. They have complied with every request. Yet for some reason, the GOP is utterly uninterested in reassuring their citizenship.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/ ... ump-352222
The sad thing is, by all accounts the Ds and Rs had come up with a bipartisan budget compromise that would have prevented the government from shutting down. And the President said at a meeting that he'd sign whatever the people on the committee agreed on. But they brought it to him and he shot it down.
Having such a volatile and capricious President undermines the ability of the already heavily polarized parties from being able to find common ground and compromise.
It is also important to remember that the two issues the Dems are fighting for here, DACA and CHIP, both have the following important properties:
- Both of them were existing Obama policies that Tr*mp went out of his way to cancel, defund, or lapse.
- Both could easily be put up for a vote in the House and Senate if they wanted to.
- In polling, both have clear bipartisan majorities of support and would pass.
But instead, the GOP has intentionally let these important programs lapse without voting on them so that they could save them until these budget negotiations, so that they could use them as political leverage against the Dems.
The way that this current administration tries to get you to "compromise" is roughly the following: take away something crucial; make you give them something hateful (wall, deportations, benefit cuts, etc.) in order to get the crucial thing back; blame you for not "compromising" if you don't.
This government shutdown hurts real people. Food stamps and other benefits stop going out, for example. National parks close. Lots of other services just stop. Every day that DACA is lapsed, there are people getting deported. Every day that CHIP has no funding, there will be children unable to get life-saving medicine. People will literally die because of this petty BS.
The administration hollowly claims that they want a "merit-based" immigration system. The immigrants who are part of DACA have demonstrated ample merit: They have jobs, educations, they work, they pay taxes, they are required to have zero criminal record. They have complied with every request. Yet for some reason, the GOP is utterly uninterested in reassuring their citizenship.