Shut It Down
The government is going to run out of money on December 8th. For those of you frantically reaching for your calendars, that is in fact in two days. How, you ask? And, you know, why??
A few months ago, on September 13 to be exact, as we neared our last government funding deadline, Chuck and Nancy (or Senator Schumer and Representative Pelosi for those of us not limited to 140 characters) headed up to the White House so that Trump could try to sell them on a deal. What they thought might be a tough conversation or even just the beginning of a protracted negotiation turned out to be a pleasant lunch over Chinese food in which Trump gave them everything they wanted. In exchange for their votes on a much shorter continuing resolution to fund the government than the Republicans wanted, they got a promise that Trump would help the DACA recipients whose lives he had so recently upended. As we near the deadline on that CR (December 8th), the budget fights that led us to that moment could very well come to a head.
Or we could force it.
The Republican Party has liked to claim for some time now, to be a “big tent” party. In theory, this means they celebrate diverse viewpoints and people with different policy ideas. In practice, this means they welcome anyone as long as they will vote for tax cuts for the super wealthy, and they enjoy an absurdly awkward kind of power. They can get a president elected, but they can’t repeal the Affordable Care Act. They can (maybe) pass some kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a tax reform bill, but they can’t pass a budget. Because they are the party of “moderates” who want to cut spending but not that much, and those who would really enjoy a more feudal system of government, their budget priorities are often in conflict.
Instead of trying to pass a budget by this Friday (because apparently there are some bills they don’t want to try to force through in the middle of the night), the current GOP plan is to pass another continuing resolution — one that would expire on December 22 instead. And in an attempt to push that to December 30, some of those medieval reprobates, the House Freedom Caucus, those purveyors of “unfettered capitalism,” almost killed the tax bill.
If strategy of the Freedom Caucus sounds confusing, it’s because it is. And no clear explanation pops up on the first two pages of a google search. But many suspect that they are afraid that the pressure of passing a spending bill before Christmas will force their GOP colleagues to cave to a raw deal.
Cave to whom, you ask? Surely not the Democrats, those losers of elections. Those impotent defenders of health care and progressive tax codes. Surely not Chuck and Nancy, nor those cloying masses shouting about insurance mandates and frantically explaining CSR payments to their friends.
Yes, my friends. They fear us.
Republicans walk a rather precarious tightrope. Make their bill too friendly to the would-be feudal overlords and they risk losing more “moderate” Republicans in purple districts. Tilt too closely to those “moderates” and they lose the Freedom Caucus. It’s a constantly shifting balancing act — how many people, exactly, can we screw over before we lose too many votes to screw anyone over. With health care, they lost that fight. With tax reform, they are terrifyingly close to winning it. But very often, when the Freedom Caucus sticks to its guns and refuses to pass anything short of draconian, Republicans need Democrats to pass the budget.
What does this mean for us?
Well, we can’t shut down the government. We’re not in charge here. We don’t have the votes to do anything (something more vicious critics of the Democrats would do well to remember). But we can demand that our members of Congress refuse to vote for a budget unless certain demands have been met — a DREAM Act with a path to citizenship for one. Funding for CHIP. The Alexander-Murray bipartisan deal to stabilize the insurance markets. If Republicans need our help to keep the government going, they are going to have to give us a little something first.
Because if they can’t do it with their own party, which controls both the executive and the legislative branches, well, that sounds like a personal problem.
Of course, it’s not. Many of us remember the government shutdown of 2013. National Parks close, many who work in government have to stay home or work without pay, EPA inspections stop, and the blame game makes Twitter even more toxic than usual. A government shutdown is a problem that belongs to all of us. But some things are more important. Like health insurance for children. And a strong and unambiguous fix to the underground economy we have allowed to exist under our noses, that we have benefited from, that we have taken advantage of, and that is built on the blood and sweat, tears and separate families, of the undocumented Americans who have made their home here.
Those of us who live in blue states have called our members of Congress, have pestered our friends, have gotten drunk and wailed into the night about our futility. We drink our wine, and we tweet at Senators who have no obligation to listen to us. We try to raise a groundswell, but it’s kind of hard from our skyscrapers. Well, now it’s our turn. We have leverage here, and we have to use it.
Call your members of Congress. Demand that they join Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders and others in refusing to vote for a government funding bill unless the DREAM Act is passed, CHIP is funded, and the ACA is stabilized.
We might not win. In fact, if “moderate” Republicans like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Jeff Flake and co. punk the fuck out again and sell their souls for the spectre of Koch donations, we probably won’t. But we have an opportunity to tell the vulnerable of this country, to tell the oppressed, and the hurt, and the struggling, that we won’t give them up. We owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to them. So pick up the phone, write an email, and call your friends.
We have work to do. And very little time to do it.
