Won't Get Fooled Again

I was fooled yesterday by Chuck Schumer’s statement that the Democrats were united in support of a 30 day “clean” CR. Foolishly, I believed this meant that Democrats were going to vote “no” on cloture to force a shutdown followed by passage of a clean CR sometime after the weekend. Because that was the obvious thing for an opposition party to do.

But, what a fool believed was not the plan. Instead, we have yet another day where we’re supposed to be calling Senators to push them to do the obvious piece of opposition work, because the intention is to give away cloture in order to allow a meaningless vote on the 30 day CR (that’s the livefeed from TPM’s new Hill reporter, Emine Yucel). Apparently, Schumer thinks we’re a bunch of saps who will accept the utter impotence of giving away power to get a for-show vote as “trying”.

While Democratic Senators try to figure out a way to have it both ways and not do anything difficult, a consensus on the bill has already formed among those who vote for them. Even the head of the biggest federal employee labor union says that it’s critical to stop the poisoned CR because the government is going through a de-facto shutdown right now.

All this brouhaha about the CR is getting in the way of the real discussion: does Congress even have the power to appropriate in the Trump Administration? The Republicans certainly want to cede it to King Musk and vassal Trump. The Senate Democrats are sticking with a plan where they let the government fall down around them while doing nothing, so they can cruise to victory in 2026. Their consultants are telling them to hide out until then. But what will that victory achieve if the post-coup Trump administration just ignores the laws they pass?

That all said, maybe I’m wrong about how this will turn out. Perhaps enough pressure from the people calling their Senators will get them to deny cloture and force a shutdown. Shouldn’t I slink away in shame if I’m wrong because I dared to question the resolve of our electeds, the members of our “team”.

If they do the right thing after enough pressure to make diamonds, I will still mourn the loss of all the energy that it took to simply get them to what’s a pretty obvious opposition position: take advantage of the weakness of your opponent. The vote in the House wasn’t a show of strength by Pastor Mike. He had to put a whole bunch of right-wing poison in the bill to get the Freedom Caucus to vote for it. There is no way a clean CR will pass with only Republican votes. So the Senate Democrats’ wobble right now is sacrificing the thing they prize the most: a bipartisan vote to keep the government open.

A clean 30-day CR passing with Democratic votes in both chambers would set us up for another leverage moment in a month. It would also probe the Trump administration’s desire to pay attention to anything Congress passes — maybe they wouldn’t bother shutting down the government, instead having Trump sign an EO that says that the debt ceiling is abolished. I mean, the stock market is already crashing, why not crash the bond markets, too?

Over at Split Ticket, a polling analysis site, Lakshya Jain, who says he’s generally a “moderation wins elections” guy, has a post on how bad the current polling is for Democrats, and how Democratic discontent could spawn our own version of the Tea Party movement.

This is where I think we’re going: fighters are in, kayfabe like the nonsense we’re seeing in the Senate this week is out. In the Walz interview I posted the other day, he noted that his perception of the Tea Party was that it was certainly in part created by media, but there was also a genuine upswell of anger behind it.

When I covered NY-29, I attended a couple of town halls where Tea Party members attended and made noise. They were mostly parroting right-wing talking points about the ACA, death panels, etc., but they cared enough to show up. They were tired of being used by Republicans to win elections, but not getting what they asked for after the elections were won. Trump is the culmination of the Tea Party movement, and he won in part because the right wing of the party believed that he’d deliver (and, in some ways they care about, he did: abortion is one example.)

We’ve been told for decades that abolishing the filibuster would be bad because then we wouldn’t have that tool of opposition if we were ever in the minority. Well, here we are, and it looks like they aren’t using it. People are tired of their bullshit. I should be writing about how Bernie and AOC are going to do town halls in red districts, how Indivisible and TeslaTakedown are working to make Musk’s name toxic, and how individuals all over the nation are helping their neighbors in the face of Musk’s coup. This is a waste of energy, and I think we’re all sick of it.