The Shutdown Thread

Here is a thread for discussion about the imminent federal government shutdown, if Republicans can't get their shit together and stop trying to deny healthcare access to children, among other indecencies.

Over at the Washington Post, Damian Paletta and Erica Werner write:

The federal government late Thursday faced increasing odds of a partial shutdown, the culmination of a long period of budget warfare that has now imperiled what most lawmakers agree is the most basic task of governance.

The immediate challenge Thursday was a refusal by Senate Democrats to join with Republicans in passing legislation that would keep the government open for 30 more days while legislators continued to negotiate a longer-term solution.

But the impasse raised deeper questions about the GOP's capacity — one year into the Trump administration — to govern. Never before has the government experienced a furlough of federal employees when a single party controls both the White House and Congress, but that's what will happen after midnight Friday if a spending bill fails to pass Congress.

Emphasis mine. Their story was published under the headline: "Looming Shutdown Raises Fundamental Question: Can GOP Govern?" No. That has been apparent for a very long time.

And of course a big part of the reason they can't govern is because they don't want to govern. Governance is fundamentally at odds with destruction, and the Republican Party has become very explicitly a party committed to destroying the government.

Paletta and Werner also note, quite rightly, that Trump bears an outsized portion of the responsibility for bringing us to the brink of this crisis:

Unlike almost any president or administration before him, Trump has fanned the flames of a shutdown.

Trump has repeatedly mused about the prospects of halting federal operations, saying at one point that the government needed a "good shutdown" to teach Democrats a lesson. The budget he proposed last year was so sparse on key details that the Congressional Budget Office said it could not analyze its impact on revenue.

His aides have not hashed out a broader spending agreement with GOP leaders or Democrats, and the White House and GOP leaders have remained split on how much money to appropriate for the military.

Further to that, Congressional Republicans spent most of 2017 trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and passing their disgusting tax bill, "spending little time focused on how to pay the government's bills this year." Senate Republicans aren't even "expected to vote on a budget resolution at all this year, a move that would have been unthinkable in recent years, as they said it was a cornerstone of good governing."

Huh.

This is what happens when people who hate government are put in charge of running it.