MACDONALD: Shutdown Schumer Rides Again - Granite Grok
October 1st is coming like an out-of-control freight train, and I can’t wait for it to get here. Republicans have returned the budget practice to regular rules of order, and Democrats don’t want to do it that way. The correct process involves twelve appropriations bills, one for each department, which are written, debated, reconciled, and passed. But it became passe in this century, and we’ve watched as massive omnibus, spiritus, octopus supersized dumpster all-in-ones have been shoved across the fiscal finish line to “keep the government from shutting down.”
I can’t recall a single budget photo finish where I wasn’t okay with the federal government shutting down. I prefer regular order, and I’m not a fan of the ever-present inclusion of back pay for every uncivil servant who got a few weeks off. If you don’t make someone hurt, nothing changes, and Captain Shutdown, Chuck Schumer, has to know he’s got a lot more to lose if he doesn’t reconcile his attitude when it comes to regular order.
In an ideal and proper world, the three budget bills in conference committees would be ironed out and passed before next Wednesday, and the nine in the House would find a path to the Senate. Anything not funded by October 1st would close shop until it is, holding to regular order until they are. As a reminder, essential stuff stays open for business, no matter what, and there’s the rub. If it’s not essential, why do we need to fund it?
The Trump Administration would be happy as a clam, pleased as punch, if Mr. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would allow Trump’s lackeys to define essential and send those people packing, perhaps forever.
When Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget has a very specific plan to use a government shutdown as leverage to enact wide-scale reforms to government efficiency along the lines of those proposed at DOGE or perhaps even more aggressively?
A short-term continuing resolution is an option, and it would keep every useless pencil pusher in their seats for the duration. Dems are, however, cranky enough about regular budgetary order that they are willing to hold a CR hostage. To load it with crap that defeats the purpose of debating appropriations by department in an effort to create more transparency with a slim shot at accountability. None of our crap in the CR, then the filibuster is on.
I say let them talk themselves to political death and let the doors close and be locked.
It is a morally repugnant thing for a peacetime government to run a budget deficit of any size larger than nominal. To do so crushes the wallets of ordinary people, depriving us of purchasing power and serving as a regressive tax to benefit the rich. The Left might sell their redistributive government spending as benefiting the poor, but that has always been a lie, as it’s wealthy, connected corporations and non-profits who rake off the spoils of oversized government, and it’s the governmental class — whether the NGOs, the lobbyists, the bureaucrats and the others — who ultimately make themselves into a neo-nobility on the backs of the country class through that deficit.
By all means, let Trump’s OMB set the table for the very thing they set out to do. Cut the size and scope of government.
What’s the Democrat Line on that? How do they explain an unwillingness to pass appropriations the way we did for 225 years before the last twenty-five? Who gets to bear the burden of blame for refusing to support a seven-week CR so we could finalize the last nine appropriations bills, because Trump’s priority is to save Americans money and save them from the invisible, multi-generational tax burden of debt-driven inflation?
You waited until September. Make your case in October in the appropriate budget. Defend holding up that appropriation to America on the merits of your case instead of trying to squirrel away garbage into shadowy corners of continuing resolutions. Which, by the way, should only pay for essential Federal pastimes as outlined in that US Constitution thing, not the division of the department of the ministry of laundromats to Liberal causes.
But then, that’s what Democrats are trying to fund, and that is why it has to stop, and they seem prepared to risk even more damage (to the Democrat Party) by ensuring the Government is shut down.
We’ve got six days. Does Schumer blink like he did in March, or does he drive the Dem Party family funding truckster off a cliff to avoid getting the threats he got in March when he caved?
