Again, if the new Dem position is no money for any border barrier ever again, then prepare to lose forever.
I don’t think compromise is losing. I think compromise is great. But compromise means each side gives the other side something they want. That’s not what happened here. Republicans got something they wanted, though not as much as they wanted. Democrats didn’t get anything in exchange.
And I think you have the tribalism accusation exactly backwards. You are calling this a win because Trump is unhappy that he didn’t get everything he wanted. That’s tribalism. If Trump got to advance his agenda and Democrats got to advance theirs, that would be a win for both sides. And that would be great.
But your calculus doesn’t allow both sides to win. You “win” by making Trump unhappy. That’s not only tribalism, that’s Trumpism.
Not at all. The Democratic position should be, “Here’s the $5 billion you want. It’s all there. Now give us something really nice in exchange, so we can both walk away happy.”
Trump didn’t get what he wanted, and he didn’t get to advance his agenda, no matter how the man tries to spin it.
Well he didn’t get much. He got just a little. But that’s something. We didn’t even get a little. Besides his tears, of course. But tears and a dollar buys you a can of Coke.
You keep saying that, but it’s no truer than the first time you said it. Trump did not get what he wanted. He shut down the government, took the brunt of that bad decision along with his party for… nothing.
I mean, he got a billion dollars
We can all circle the wagons and pat ourselves on the back that it wasn’t 2 or 5 or 20 or 100. but it’s a billion dollars. That’s a bewildering sum of money. It’s money that could be put toward so many more worthwhile things than erecting racist barricades against innocent asylum seekers along our border.
Am I glad that it’s 1 instead of 2 or 5 or 20 or 100? Sure!
But it’s still an extraordinary waste of invaluable resources and a slap in the face to the American taxpayer.
Like I said earlier, if our only goal in negotiations is to make sure Trump gets less than he asks for, then our strategy is deeply flawed. Someone above actually said it would be OK to give him $5 billion, provided he asked for $50 billion. I can’t even
We gained some political capital in the process, I’ll grant you that. But gaining political capital is not a win. Converting political capital to something concrete is a win.
You both keep coming at this like our spending on that border, including the fences was at zero before Trump. It wasn’t. There were fences there before Trump. You can’t reasonably start at zero in the first place.
He took lumps and blame, dragged down his party with him and got nothing for it. There are also things in that budget Democrats actually want, but you guys keep looking for some sort of gotcha line item, and that wasn’t a real goal. That’s how Fox News likes to sell government, but it’s not a reasonable outcome.
I mean I’m an open-borders extremist. My upset really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone by this point :P
Not to me no, but I also don’t think the push for an actual open border is actually a huge one for Democrats in general. It’s fear-mongering pushed by the GOP and their media wings, but largely unfounded, well except for a few of our open leftist around here.
The party came around on Medicare for All. The Overton Window will shift again, by Science!
Ok, but the last deal was negotiated by Speaker Ryan (admittedly with Democratic support). Is it too much to expect some incremental improvement from Speaker Pelosi?
I mean I’m not expecting Medicare for All (for now). But I do expect someone to at least throw us a bone. Elections have consequences. Except when they don’t.
The current Republican party will not–cannot–do this. To expect otherwise is woefully naive. Compromise is a dead word.
You mean other than having the longest shutdown in history and having the President and his party take nearly 100% blame for it, and then going back to the table with less than what caused that entire episode to begin with. The shutdown cost… billions, and the public, including people who used to or even still to some degree support Trump, blame him for that.
You would have the Democrats take all that and stupidly roll dice stacked against them with another shutdown by saying no to this budget for some undefined or at best loosely defined line item, any line item, so we can send our representatives looking at assholes across various stages saying see, see we’re really the Deal Makers here, look at those losers? That’s just bullshit spin for idiot voters whose minds cannot be changed, keeping in mind, no matter what happened, no matter what line item showed up, Trump would get on his stage, say whatever he wants, and his base would believe him.
The only thing Democrats would wind up doing with that dice is actually lose, which they did not do in this case.
Yes, I fully understand that right now winning may be impossible. I can accept that.
Many decades ago, people talked about “gridlock”. Nobody was getting what they wanted. But they didn’t pretend that it was a form of victory. Nobody said, “OK team, we got nothing done this year. Hurray! Because man oh man the other side is really mad!”
At the time, we all knew gridlock was a form of failure. Not devastating, and maybe inevitable, but still failure. And I simply can’t accept redefining victory to encompass such lowered expectations.
You got hundreds of billions of stuff that you wanted.
Speaker Ryan is the one who got me that stuff. I guess I’m ungrateful.
Yes, like I said at got some political capital. Which is like a first down. It means something only if you can convert it to something more concrete.
Nope. Like I said, I think Democrats were dealt a losing hand and did the best they could. I don’t call that a win, but it could’ve been much worse.
You already said this.
Ok, but the last deal was negotiated by Speaker Ryan (admittedly with Democratic support)
He didn’t do that alone.
.
Not us reading the last 50 posts.