Don’t You Dare: Why Democrats Must Shut It Down

Democrats, I’m here, as I do from time to time, to offer you some advice you’ll likely ignore as we enter into the next continuing resolution fight.

First, a question: what part of this new era don’t you understand?

The old Washington logic of dutifully keeping the government functioning died years ago. It died when Mitch McConnell smirked his way through blocking Merrick Garland. It died when Trump turned the White House into a kleptocracy of golf carts and grift. It died when January 6 was not the end of Trumpism but its baptism into holy war against America and its system of government, when the barbarians didn’t just storm the gates, but were recast as heroes.

The logic from even a few years ago about who wins and loses in shutdown scenarios has radically altered in the last six months of Trump 2, Autocratic Boogaloo.

You get zero credit for “keeping the government open.”

None. The Beltway press will give you a polite golf clap and then pivot to how you blinked. Fox will spit in your face and call you weak-kneed, terrorist-enabling pedophiles.

MAGA voters sitting in their decaying suburbs, financially desperate but entirely brainwashed, will despise you more for enabling programs they pretend to hate. You are not buying goodwill with these votes. You are buying your own humiliation and destruction.

You tell yourselves, “I’m doing this to keep program X alive in my district.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s executive-power goon squad claims the right to kill your pet program with the stroke of a pen and no oversight from you or the courts. You think you are protecting your people. In reality, you are protecting the machine that is grinding them into dust...