Just as a reminder, Congress has until September 30 to pass a federal budget, or the government will shut down (again). Trump has threatened to shut down the government at least seven times in the past six weeks:
After spending the summer threatening to shut down the government if Congress doesn’t give him billions of dollars to build a border wall, President Trump is now declaring he thinks a shutdown is good politics for him.
That’s despite the fact nearly everyone else in his party disagrees.
Republicans control all of Washington, and if the government shuts down at the end of this month when the fiscal year ends, it would come just weeks before most members of Congress face voters. Republican leaders have a hard time imagining a more nightmarish scenario for their party: The government has already shut down briefly twice this year under their watch, and the Republicans’ majority is on the line this November in the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate.
Yet Trump doesn’t seem to care much. Each time he appears to assuage Republican leaders’ concerns by moderating his position, he says something a day or two later more strongly in favor of a shutdown.
What Trump ultimately does will decide whether the government shuts down this month — and, potentially, Republicans’ fate in the midterms.
Congress should be doing its damn job and passing a budget to keep the government operating, especially this week when there is a catastrophic hurricane bearing down on the Carolina coast. Government rescue and relief efforts are going to be needed.
Instead, the geniuses (sic) in the GOP leadership, after passing its $1.5 trillion GOP tax cut scam bill earlier this year that has predictably led to an unprecedented round of stock buybacks (and not investment or raises for workers) and created a record deficit, “retreated to their policy war room, thought and debated and deliberated and analyzed, and came up with a bold new proposal for where to go next: “GOP tax cut scam 2.0.”
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