I don’t get it. Republicans can’t or won’t write a budget that will get the votes it needs to pass. They don’t work with democrats. So, they write a CR instead.
This is a familiar repeating pattern. They stuff the CR with provisions to allow them to try to cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security at a later date. They expect democrats to cave to the CR. The senate democrats could have stopped the CR by declaring it DOA prior to it being forwarded to the senate from the house. But Chuck Schumer did not do that. He could have stated that the poison pill CR would go nowhere and demanded that the Republicans go back and write a budget that they could send that would pass. But he did not do that. Schumer could have insisted on a budget, a fair budget, that does not make the cuts the republicans are trying to get away with making that are deeply unpopular with voters and the public in general. Senate democrats, with Chuck Schumer as their leader, say they will do all they can to protect Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security and not allow cuts to those programs. Yet they will probably vote for cloture on the CR with no effort to prevent the malware in the CR that would be a back door for the republicans attempting cuts later. Is the democratic promise to protect these social programs just a joke or are they simply too lazy or afraid to try to break the pattern of ultimatum and capitulation because its such a long-standing habit?
Is it all just meaningless rhetoric and what they think makes for good optics? Will Senate democrats ever have a leader who would be able to lead them on a journey of change that we need as a country and stop the familiar behaviors of worrying and hand wringing and actually adopt the principle to force needed changes? This stagnation and lack of courage to force necessary changes indicates to me that leadership is feeble and perhaps needs to retire and allow younger, more energetic leadership to take the reins.
It’s a very familiar repeating pattern: Republicans can’t write a budget that will pass so they write what they call “a clean CR” and stuff it with what they want as a clever way to attempt to do the real damage that they want to do at a latter date without, of course, disclosing that to their constituents or the public at large. They do this because they are cowards. But it gives them a back door and gets their job of serving their paymasters done. So, the republicans set up their ultimatum for the democrats. The choices the republicans give the democrats are: either vote for the CR to keep the government open and give them what they want which will enable them to later go back to doing the real damage, or close the government down, which would encourage Trump to use the stalemate to his advantage.
This very familiar repeating pattern of ultimatum and capitulation is very old, very dysfunctional, very unproductive, and perpetuates the stasis of governance. It sure would be nice if both parties could actually start getting things done once again. But that can’t happen until they stop playing the political/partisan game of war game they have engaged in for half a century.
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