Vote the Bums Out
Would it be histrionic to say that Trump has turned these ten senators? Perhaps so. But it’s worth noting that Republicans now think that this is the case, and they intend to act on it accordingly. As NBC News’ Sahil Kapur reported Friday night, “Two Republican senators told me … this vote shows they can execute the same strategy again—cut Democrats out of the negotiations on a gov’t funding bill, pass it through the House, and expect Senate Dems to back down and not filibuster it.” Suffice it to say, Trump has ten senators over the barrel—and one of them is Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader.
Regardless of whether or not these senators have gone full Vichy, the more obvious thing to say about them is that they are cowards, and thus unfit to serve in office. It’s bad enough that they surrendered their ability to credibly criticize the president’s slash-and-burn campaign against our civic fabric. What’s more galling is that they did so despite the fact that their greatest fear going into the vote—that the public would somehow hold them, the party out of power, responsible for a government shutdown—wasn’t going to materialize: A Quinnipiac poll from midweek revealed that only 32 percent of respondents would blame Democrats for a shutdown, against 54 percent blaming either congressional Republicans or Trump himself. In other words, these ten senators forced the rest of the Democratic caucus to fold on a winning hand.
And if the cowardice isn’t enough to disquality these senators, consider the stupidity. Why was anyone in the Democratic caucus afraid of a future government shutdown? The government, for all intents and purposes, is at this very moment shut down. Masses of civil service employees have been cashiered, key systems have been seized, the ability to freely spend money has been suspended, and Musk’s goons are going from department to department ripping the wires of the walls. There are still people drawing paychecks, and a thin and thready pulse is still beating somewhere in the administrative state, but there’s no telling how much longer this will be the case.
