Trump did this during his first term for 35 days….
Republican lawmakers have developed a allergy to another one….
Donald Trump don’t give a shit…..
House Republicans do NOT have their act together….
Differenat factions ….
A President that does NOT want cuts to somethings the RightWingNuts want….
And…
Wants to spend on things that would wreck the budget….
Red state lawmakers that want to stop and restore some cuts…..
And get rid of some tariffs….
This while the Democrats lying in wait to get BACK stuff Musk/Project 2025, and Trump have ripped up….
It’s gonna be interesting
And MESSY….
The myopia is blinding.
As President Donald Trump blasts through a Washington that is clearly struggling to keep pace with his disruptive moves on everything from names on maps to the fate of backwater parts of the bureaucracy to the new, confusingU.S. strategy on the future of Ukraine, keeping the establishment perpetually off balance may well be the prevailing vibe over the next four years.
What almost everyone is missing: This country has roughly one month until the government runs out of money, and things like paychecks to troops, food-inspection programs, disaster-relief payments, and aid to low-income families could all be caught up in a chaotic game of chicken. Republicans could keep the lights on all on their own, but probably won’t. “They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters last week, setting up a blame-game preamble. Jeffries is factually correct. Even still, Republicans may end up needing a bailout from Democratic lawmakers before March 14. That gives Democrats their first real leverage in Trump’s second term, but it’s entirely unclear if they will use it or to what end. While a unified plan has yet to emerge, wisps of fight-ready ambitions are starting to move from the fringes to the mainstream, albeit more slowly than most rank-and-file Democrats would like.
That’s not to say Republicans have their own house in order. Even though House Republicans pushed through a budget outline on Thursday after 12 hours of debate, there’s no guarantee that it proves sufficiently lean for budget hardliners on the Right. Meanwhile, the Senate has plenty of ideas for its own spending plan, including possibly splitting Trump’s agenda into two discrete pieces. That is setting up an intra-party collision that is all too familiar from the first Trump term.
It’s not a stretch to say that Democrats could end up being needed to pass a bill they abhor to avoid a catastrophic collapse entirely not of their making—but within their power to avert.
Lost to no one is the man sitting in the Oval Office already holds the record for the longest government shutdown in history, the 35-day shutdown in 2018 into 2019 over Trump’s demands for $5.7 billion in border fencing. (He eventually wrestled $1.375 billion for it, while the total cost of the shutdown to the whole U.S. economy hit $11 billion, according to the non-partisan congressional scorekeepers.) Like so much of his first term, the shutdown let Trump create a problem and then take credit for ending it. He saw that as a win.
As odds of shutdown grow, here are the realities facing Washington that are coloring the negotiations, and the possible offramps from the status quo….
…
The ongoing spending spat is heading toward a violent collision unless both parties’ leaders figure out how to get to a mutually disappointing outcome. On their own, Republicans probably cannot get the package out of the House.
That means Johnson is probably going to need to rely on a handful of votes from Jeffries to keep Democrats’ priorities like HeadStart, food stamps, troop funding, and rent assistance humming along. Democrats have proven willing to help in the past, deciding a line-in-the-sand moment that would pause government is never worth chasing. Just witness last year, when 185 House Democrats and 47 Senate Democrats backed a funding bill that banned Pride flags flying over embassies…
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