The only good thing about the Schumer Surrender on Trump’s Shithole Shutdown is that it killed the pretext for Trump’s chamberlain, House Speaker Mousy Mike Johnson, to hold up the business of the House, which would have included the swearing in of the special election winner in Arizona, Democratic Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, who along with all other Democrats and four Republican heretics would be enough votes to pass a resolution on releasing the Epstein Files. ™ Well, Wednesday, Johnson had to do exactly that. And of course such a petition would also have to be passed by the Senate, and if that happened it would certainly be vetoed by Childish Caligula, requiring an override. But even as the House action happened, various sources, including Republican committees, started releasing some of the information that they had access to, including emails released by the Epstein family estate and distinct from the Epstein Files ™ in question. The one that got the most attention is a 2011 email where Epstein told accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump is “the dog that hasn’t barked” because one of Epstein’s victims spent hours at his house with Trump and was “never once mentioned by investigators”, saying “I’m 75% there”, which probably means 75 percent towards deducing that Trump was a mole for law enforcement. Epstein also told a confidant that he’d met Trump at a Thanksgiving event in 2017 – after Epstein had already been convicted of state charges for child prostitution but before being convicted of federal charges. And after Trump was first inaugurated president. And then the big story Friday was the email where Mark Epstein asked his brother Jeffrey if Vladimir Putin had a photo of Trump “blowing Bubba“…
Did I mention that the end of last week was my birthday?
Happy Birthday to Me
Happy Birthday to Me
Fuck Trump up the a-aaaass
Happy Birthday to Me
(and many more…)
But I still want to go over exactly why the shutdown surrender was a bad thing overall even if it is paying dividends and is getting the country back to normal, whatever that is under the Trump occupation. Because while that regime may be ending soon, the way things went down just confirms that Republicans are only part of the problem.
Why did the Democrats shut down the government, when that never goes well? Because they already caved earlier in the year. In March, there was a lapse of funding that required a continuing resolution to last through September. Many Democrats in both Houses of Congress opposed the resolution given that the Trump regime was already taking money from several government programs, and under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (‘O BUBBA’) would end up defunding a lot more by legislation. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (of New York) decided to get enough Democrats to pass the continuing resolution, despite opposition within his own party. This was partially because Trump had already put many decisions under Elon Musk’s ‘Department Of Government Efficiency’ and a shutdown of Congress would only give DOGE more authority to take congressional powers away.
But in the subsequent months, not only did Congress pass Trump’s One Big Bullshit Bill, the Trump regime, while relying less on DOGE, continued to withhold spending that had already been earmarked for the fiscal year. Democrats indicated that they wished to avoid a shutdown – which Republicans under Trump had been threatening in order to force more concessions – but Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought said “The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan”, adding that the White House would not abide by bipartisan spending agreements and that he believed the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional. But the Congressional majority has generally gone along with all this, because the Banana Republican Party is all in on the idea of a unitary executive, which Donald Trump takes to mean that he can do anything he wants because he was directly appointed by God, who is also himself.
The issue was clear. Shut down the government, and Trump exercises unitary authority. Do nothing, and Trump exercises unitary authority anyway.
It’s sort of like a labor strike. Now kids, some of you may not even know what that is, but it’s when the labor force at a given business stops coming to work in order to demand better wages, benefits or work conditions. And it usually involves some of the workers picketing the business front to discourage third-party workers (‘scabs’) from coming to the job. This requires solidarity from everyone involved, which is why it’s kind of hard to run a strike these days. And when in this case you had people like the Nevada Senators and John Fetterman who were not keen on the shutdown to begin with. But in a strike, everybody knows there is going to be hardship, because they (unlike Congress) aren’t getting paid. But they do it anyway, for the principle, and because if they did nothing, things would get even worse. Usually, for a strike to succeed, it has to put the onus on the holdout party (management, in this case Republicans). And because everyone knows the Congress are not a bunch of poor miners or kitchen workers, it is hard for them to put the onus on the party that didn’t want the shutdown. But when the president of that party was petitioning the Supreme Court for the previously not-acknowledged right to withhold SNAP benefits to the poor, everyone knew who was really responsible, and that Trump wasn’t just supporting the shutdown, he was escalating the suffering. And the off-year elections, in which hardly any Republican won, should have indicated where the public pressure was going. Even Trump twitted that the shutdown was one reason for the election results. And the public was willing to support the Democrats because they knew that if they did nothing, they would lose social services anyway.
Really, if the Lamestream Media thought that Trump’s non-negotiation negotiation was a case of hostage taking, it was a case of the bank robbers getting everybody in the bank together then showing the police the bank president. Then shooting him. And then saying “Let us get all the money and get out of here free, or we’ll shoot the bank president.”
“Uh… dude, you already shot him.”
“Oh.”
It is testimony to how inept Trump is that he thought this would work and testimony to how much MORE inept Democrats are that it did.
Which doesn’t change the fact that a shutdown hardly ever works for the party that initiates it, and it was that much less likely to work given Trump’s infinite appetite to inflict pain not only on the country at large but Democrats and heretical Republicans in particular. So if the Democrats didn’t make the best of the one option they had, the other issue is that they didn’t see if they could create other options.
As Reed Galen pointed out Thursday, it’s not as though Democratic leadership didn’t have time to plan. “If Election Day last year was Tuesday, November 5, 2024 and Inauguration Day was January 20, 2025, that left 76 days, two and a half months, for the opposition party, that is, the Democrats, to huddle, brainstorm, plan, and execute any number of tactics that could have slowed down the new administration. Joe Biden was still President of the United States during this period.
Likewise, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer knew a short-term funding bill would be needed in March. He didn’t (do anything) about it a week ahead of time, but months in advance. When the time came, as we know, he and nine of his colleagues didn’t so much as cross the aisle to stop it, let alone stand athwart history.
…In 2021, Democrats passed emergency subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare, if you’re nasty) with the American Rescue Act. They extended them through the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. They were the ones who passed the bill that phased out the subsidies come December 31st, 2025. They’ve known this deadline was coming for three years.”
So Schumer had to go along with the shutdown in fall because he had no plan to deal with his party’s lack of options in March, (other than caving in advance like they did then) and that was because they did not make any plans after November 2024.
What plans? Well, as I’ve said, maybe they could have looked at what Republicans did under Obama and Biden and used every counter-majoritarian stop in the system to do to Trump what his party did to stymie their presidents. But there was not only bad strategy, there was NO strategy.
As I’ve said in regard to Obama in particular, the Democrats are the real conservatives of American politics, at least if one regards our main Founding Father as Franklin Roosevelt rather than Thomas Jefferson. They see things only in terms of their paradigm and years after Trump came on the scene – heck, years after Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh came on the scene – they have no clue how to react to people who don’t play by their rules. Even Obama, who is both more intelligent and more assertive than the typical politician, didn’t seem to grasp that Mitch McConnell and his party didn’t regard him as a legitimate president. And they actually treated Obama better than Biden. At least they acknowledged Obama was elected.
In 2016, I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, and I still maintain that that didn’t make any difference because my state voted for her anyway. But there are a lot of states where people didn’t vote for her or voted “third” party and that made the difference for Trump in the Electoral College. And what we just saw is a good part of why that happened. The idea that there’s no difference between the two sides, the idea that even if there is, Democrats aren’t going to do anything, or George Carlin’s assessment that “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-mozilla-102&hsimp=yhs-102&hspart=mozilla&p=it%27s+an+elite+club+and+you+ain%27t+in+it&type=newtabv2Aug27#id=1&vid=ef6d4ec948c9c826c554c59741695aa1&action=click The idea that Democrats are in the same club as the Republicans and they can use the shutdown and the ACA as political issues to rile up the voters, and as soon as they win elections, go back to not caring. After all, once you’re elected, you don’t need to worry about health care.
There are two problems with that: One, it wasn’t the US Congress that was being elected, and two, if anybody still believes that Washington Democrats and Republicans are in the same club, it’s just the Washington Democrats. Everyone else recognizes that the Republicans are not a ‘liberal’ (as in market liberal, small-r republican) party but the right-wing version of a Leninist cadre that works within the system only so long as they have to and as soon as they have eliminated all procedural obstacles, anyone who opposes them will get put up against the wall. Which makes the Democrat Senators’ sellout that much more inexplicable and counter-productive.
And that just gets to the point that if everyone is blaming Chuck Schumer for the shutdown, despite his conspicuous statements of opposition to the deal, it’s because it’s only the latest example of a pattern. He had already failed to recognize the nature of his opposition in March. At the time, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D.-California) said “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing. I think that’s what happened the other day.” Schumer retains his position mainly because he is an expert organizer and fundraiser for establishment Senate candidates, which also means he acts as a gatekeeper for who’s “establishment.” It is widely perceived, for instance, that after rabble-rousing leftist Graham Platner announced a Maine Senate campaign to unseat Republican Susan Collins, Schumer not only got current Maine Governor Janet Mills to primary Platner, he got opposition research to come out regarding (among other things) the Totenkopf tattoo Platner got in the military. Which on one level would be fine. Janet Mills is not a hothead. She is a popular, respected and vetted politician who would be a better Senator than Susan Collins, if only because she doesn’t vote with the Trump Party. However Susan Collins is 72 and Janet Mills is 5 years older than that. And we’ve already had Dianne Feinstein (D.-California) and other cases to show us what happens if a Senator stays in office until they die of old age. During the election season, Schumer never endorsed Zohran Mamdani, the official Democratic nominee for New York Mayor, even after Mamdani got the endorsement of New York Congressman and Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries. Schumer wouldn’t even tell reporters whom he did vote for in New York. It was suspected that Schumer preferred former Mayor and Governor Andrew Cuomo, who lost the Democratic primary by a large margin, partially due to personal scandals and partially due to his assumption that being an establishment politician was an asset. And in the November shutdown deal, Schumer apparently did not want the eight Democrat-aligned Senators to go with the Republicans but he was unable to stop them. In fact he was apprised of their efforts even though he publicly opposed them. Oh, and here’s a news bit that hasn’t been publicized in the wake of all this: The Republican rider to the continuing funding bill that ended the shutdown included a provision allowing Republican Senators who were investigated by the government over the January 6 insurrection to sue the government for up to $500,000 each. This was added at the insistence of Senate Majority Leader John Thune (BR.-South Dakota) but Schumer signed off on it.
According to CNN’s Harry Enten, Schumer is “the least popular Democratic Senate leader ever” in polls dating back to 1985. Cause just think, we’re going to have to do this all over again when the continuing provision expires in January. And with friends like this, who needs enemas?
Even now, with Trump hemorraging, that doesn’t guarantee that America will get back to a good or even tolerable government, because both parties have been operating on “norms” rather than enforceable laws. And when the Trump Party acknowledges neither laws nor norms, the rest of the country needs to use what processes remain to stop them. And that requires an opposition that is willing to do so. Which currently doesn’t exist. So it needs to be created. I mean you never know, the next wannabe autocrat might not have a Mar-a-Lago full of sexual skeletons to expose, although to judge from Epstein’s black book, there’s probably going to be a lot of future candidates.