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Notes -
Senate ends shutdown.
With no provision to extend COVID-era ACA subsidies, merely a vote, it has the appearance and character of a Democrat loss. The usual suspects on Reddit are crying foul of cowardice.
But could it have ended any other way? The Democrats are obliged to government unions, who weren't being paid: and to the urban poor, who weren't getting SNAP. Two massive interests within their base were being sacrificed for the benefit of... four million recipients? The math never added up.
You could say that the Republicans were heartless, but they have come out of it looking like fighters and winners, while the Democrats have capitulated to 'fascists'. The midterms will still probably be a Dem victory, but this act by Schumer and the moderates will not be something the #resistance will be likely to forget anytime soon.
I'm mostly experience whiplash from the DNC messaging. I wonder at the hypothetical bugman who just uncritically believes all of it. Because in the span of hours, we went from "This is a Republican shutdown" to "Who are the traitorous Democrats who caved and allowed the government to open again?"
Ah well. No helping it.
I do not see the contradiction. As an analogy, consider the Ukraine-Russian war. I think it would be fair for Ukrainians to claim that this is Putin's war. However, it seems also likely that if the top eight military officials of Ukraine conspired to unconditionally surrender to Putin, the war would be over in very short order.
Would that make you go "Ha! This shows that it was Zelenskyy's war all along, he could have stopped it any time by surrendering!"?
Now, if the Democrat party line had been that they would never vote for a budget while Trump was president, I think it would be fair to call it a Democrat shutdown. But from what I can tell, they just wanted a few token concessions around the ACA, hardly something completely outlandish. In such cases, it falls to the party which controls the government to negotiate, and their failure to do so reflected very badly on MAGA. In fact, Trump pointed out the very same thing during an Obama shutdown.
I am realist enough not to expect the Dems to watch a million Americans starve to death before they decide to "put the country before partisan politics" or "be the bigger person". But from what I have heard, the number of citizens which died from lack of SNAP benefits is basically zero.
At this point, what MAGA should do is announce that any time a bill of theirs will not pass, Noem will kill another puppy. That should be enough to get the spineless Democrats to vote for it lest they be complicit in puppy killing.
In this metaphor Democrats are Putin: the shutdown / war would not have happened but for… Maybe Zelensky should have negotiated with Russia and they wouldn’t have had to invade. Maybe Trump should have conceded what Chuck Schumer wanted, and then they wouldn’t have had to filibuster.
No democrat believes they are Putin in that scenario, so there's no contradiction there.
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