The Three Portents of a Government Shutdown

If Congress fails to pass a spending bill by midnight on Friday, President Trump’s first 100 days will culminate in a government shutdown. It’s a dream scenario for progressives and their we’re-still-with-her media, who are always looking for fresh ways to portray President Trump’s administration as the Hindenburg of American politics. The left-wing media are framing the possible shutdown along the lines of, “Wow, Republicans control everything, and the government still might shut down. A pox upon them! A plague on both their houses (and their president)!”

The progressive fan-fiction version of events is not likely to pan out. The real threat of a shutdown left after President Trump gave up his threat of demanding border-wall funding — though Democrats can still use the filibuster to block a vote on a spending bill or continuing resolution.

The latest collective tantrum over funding Mr. Trump’s border wall is simply the latest in a long line of Democrats rejecting American security needs.

For eight years, President Obama used the bully pulpit of the presidency to push the idea that Congress must accept every detail of his disastrous agenda because “elections matter.” “The election’s over,” he famously explained to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who had the gall to disagree with him at a health care summit. In 2009, he gave top Republicans the foot-stomping chide, “I won.” After the 2012 election he continued this line of elections-matter reasoning, saying things like, “We just had an entire campaign about it.”

After the partial government shutdown in 2013, Mr. Obama seethed at Republicans, “You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election.”

Clearly the Republicans thought that was good advice. They followed it and now control both houses of Congress and the presidency. Yet, somehow, Congressional Democrats have convinced themselves that their radical left-wing agenda is massively popular. Democrats believe, somehow, that the wave elections of 2010, 2014, and 2016 that filled the government with Republicans were a mass accident of some kind. Millions of people showed up to the polls, slipped on banana peels, and accidentally sent all the Democrats home.

[lz_ndn video=32312843]

They tried to prove that their astounding loss of power was all just a bad dream by bulldozing money into special elections in Kansas and Georgia, where they failed to win but claimed victory because they did less awful than usual in those districts.

They may or may not use their last vestige of control — the Senate filibuster, which requires a three-fifths supermajority to stop debate on legislation. How can we know for sure? Here are three signs that signal a government shutdown is imminent:

1) Democrats discover a new way to make us less safe
Democrats live to spend taxpayer money. All of them are Bernie Bros at heart, believing they have way better ideas than you about how to spend all that money you earn.

The only thing they hate spending money on is making the country safer. During the Cold War, which the U.S. won by spending big on defense, they shut down the government more than once in attempts to cut defense spending. Any time spending money protects Americans, Democrats start fumbling around like they suddenly lost America’s wallet. They become like that one friend you can’t go to dinner with because his bladder inevitably reaches full capacity the moment the check hits the table.

Jimmy Carter tried to stop funding for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in 1978; the government shut down. The Democrat-led House of Representatives tried to stop missile funding in 1982; the government shut down. They tried to cut defense spending by $11 billion in 1983; the government shut down. They tried to stop Reagan’s crime-fighting spending in 1984; the government shut down.

The latest collective tantrum over funding Mr. Trump’s border wall is simply the latest in a long line of Democrats’ rejecting American security needs. They won that battle for now, but they may decide to keep pushing as the deadline nears.

2) Democratic rhetoric goes from ordinary insanity to Three Mile Island
In 2013, Democrats decided that Republicans’ shutting down the government was comparable to terrorism. Deciding to liken Republicans to Islamists who commit mass murders, White House senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer rejected the idea of “negotiating with people [Congressional Republicans] who have a bomb strapped to their chest.”

Vice President Biden reportedly accused Republicans of “acting like terrorists” during the 2011 debt fight. He was allegedly echoing the sentiments of Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) who definitely said “we have negotiated with terrorists.”

Ordinarily, disagreeing with Democrats only makes Republicans racist, sexist and xenophobic, but when there’s a government shutdown on the line, it makes them an offshoot of Al Qaeda.

3) Republicans start jumping overboard
Not all Congressional Republicans are the Freedom Caucus type. Most of them are longing for The New York Times or The Washington Post to sprinkle a few kind words on them. They live for it. Unfortunately, the only way to make that happen is to surrender the Republican cause du jour. It’s the first commandment of the swamp-monster-ism practiced by Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham—”thou shalt reject conservative ideas in exchange for liberal praise.”

[lz_related_box id=45264]

Leading up to the 2013 partial government shutdown, when Democrats were comparing Republicans to terrorists, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) called Republicans “lemmings with suicide vests” because they were willing to see the government shut down over Obamacare funding.

Nunes got to be the hero of liberal media for a day. They wrote stories that portrayed him as bravely standing up to Republican divisiveness, which is the newspaper equivalent of a confetti shower.

If we start to see these conditions brewing in the next few hours, we’ll know a government shutdown may still be looming. If not, we may avoid the political brinksmanship we’ve become accustomed to for a few more days or, if we’re lucky, maybe even for a few more months.

Eddie Zipperer is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College and a regular LifeZette contributor.