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- Shut Up and Fail Quietly
Here are all the things I don’t get about Schumer’s cave today:
Why did he let Jeffries go through the motions of whipping his caucus to almost unanimously vote against the CR — and clearly, some of them were afraid of this vote — if the ultimate end game was to pass it?
Why did he take days to do this? All that the drama around the CR did was disappoint engaged Democrats.
Does he (and his consultants) think that putting up some kind of a dumb show about this will work? To be clear, the show is: vote for cloture (60-vote threshold), vote for 30 day clean CR that will fail, vote against CR but it passes because there’s now a 50 vote threshold. Frankly, now that he’s let the cat out of the bag, I wonder if there will even be a 30 day clean CR vote.
Does he really believe the shit he spouted on the floor about how a government shutdown would enable Musk and Trump by letting them only re-open certain branches of government? Doesn’t he understand that Musk/Trump are already selectively shutting down government?
In AOC’s interview with John Stewart (I know, yuk), she talked about the predictability of Dems. She pointed out that the seniority system was one, and there are many other structures and hierarchies that Democrats hew to:
It makes the Democratic Party highly predictable in the decisions it’s going to make, in the people that we’re going to select, in the type of people we advance in the way that we make decisions. And when we are highly predictable to the opposition, they will be one, two, four steps ahead. They know what Democrats are going to do.
With that in mind, one way to look at this week’s activities is that Pastor Mike knew that he couldn’t get a clean CR through the House. But he wanted to intimidate Democrats, whose expectation was that his historical inability to unite his caucus would give them a role in negotiating a CR in the House. So, Johnson put a bunch of shit that the Freedom Caucus would like into the CR. He knew it would pass, it passed, and he adjourned the House to put maximum pressure on Senate Democrats. He made a bet, a risky bet, that Democrats would cave and pass his piece-of-shit-CR. His bet paid off, barring a miracle. He combined his view of the predictable nature of Democratic response with a knowledge that his continued existence as Speaker requires fealty to Trump, in order to produce a result that would please Trump. And, goddamit, if the Senate passes this CR tomorrow, the one thing I know for sure is that Trump will be pleased, at least momentarily.
This will probably be one of the last posts I write about Congressional action to oppose Trump. Unless something major changes, Democrats in Congress have shown all of their cards. I’m going to now concentrate on: primaries, protests, and local and state action. I just hope Democrats don’t think they can fool us again, because part of this ugly spectacle was Schumer in particular running to the floor and telling bald-faced lies:
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