Locked? We haven’t even thrown Zinke into the conversation yet. Wonder if he is working today??
He is. He's giving tours to tourists on the capitol mall. I'd much rather him leading tours than the Dept. of Interior, so - silver lining!
The shutdown sucks. It's a failure of congress to actually do their job and pass a budget. Congress wasted budget reconcilliation (51 votes to pass) on tax cuts rather than on passing a budget. Tax reform had a good, bipartisan group working on solving some of the problems, but donor dollars were more important to the majority, so they used their procedural gimmick to get what their donors asked for - more money.
If they would have actually done their work and focused on putting a budget together, we wouldn't be looking at a short term CR. Yet here we are. Dems have been promised votes on stand alone bills, only to never have those votes come up because of McConnell. Rather than blaming one side or another, look at leadership and see how they've not done a damn thing they said they were going to do, especially when it comes to budgets. A gov't controlled by one party should be able to pass a budget, don't you think?
THere is a good coalition of dem & rep senators working on a solution. I'd rather put my hope in that vessel than continue to carp about what either party does. Dreamers are not illegals. They are registered aliens and were given protection because they were kids when they came to the U.S. They're veterans, first responders, largely college educated and they have low criminal rates. They pay taxes, have solid family lives and are productive members of American society. They're exactly the kind of people that make America great.
The Solomon's choice offered by McConnell for CHIP ignores the last 5 months of efforts to reauthorize CHIP, only to be stymied by McConnell's refusal to bring it up for a vote. It has 58 yes votes already. Dream Act has 56, IIRC.
We're at an impasse because the leadership wants a fight, rather than to govern.
I hope it ends soon, and we can get back to bashing the poor decisions that this administration is making. It's much more comical to do that than to look at 545 fools who can't seem to find common ground on anything.
