US Government Shutdown Watch: 2018 Edition. More Bricks in the Wall?

Refunded or defunded?

Defunded, my bad

I guess. But it strikes me as kind of passive aggressive, and IMO more importantly likely could fall into the category of “telegraphing your every move” that Trump likes to blather on about. (Assuming you’re trying to fool someone.)

I mean, HR1 solves lots of the very specific rot in our democracy. I would happily trade the wall for it.

And it would be a savvy response to say ‘here is your WHOLE wall, but you have to stamp out corruption.’

Yeah, I’d be for Pelosi and Schumer coming back over the top and saying “we’ve got an even better deal for you. $30 billion for the wall and you pass HR1.”

I like the sound of that. DACA is, unfortunately, a political loser. Americans don’t care about those folks, which sucks, but it is what it is.

Response from the thread: Why negotiate?

Then Nate Silver suggests the same thing…offering something in exchange for the wall…

Ah, now it’s interesting. Where’s all the “no negotiation” shouts now?

What’s changed? Well, Trump offered a terrible DACA deal, I suppose. Right after the Supreme Court basically extended it for another year anyway. To anyone other than Trump supporters, who will listen only to him anyway, it’s clear that Trump hasn’t done anything here. But that won’t stop the media from trumpting to the heavens “Trump made an offer, Democrats now own the shutdown.”

Democrats would have been better off controlling the negotiation narrative. Instead, now they have to react to this nothing offer.

The good news is that late is better than never. Start making offers that give Trump his wall win in exchange for some real, beneficial policy changes.

I hadn’t heard about the big anti corruption, voting rights law, and considered it as a potential trade.

It was, and remains, nonsensical to negotiate against yourself.

  1. Trump and McConnell especially aren’t going to consider HR1. It’s a fun idea, but ain’t gonna happen.

  2. The senate hasn’t voted yet. They’re likely to approve this BRIDGE stuff, but they may not.

  3. Democrats may still hold the cards.

Of course they won’t consider HR1 (it would unravel 20 years of GOP work to unravel our democracy)… But that is kind of the point.

Trump doesn’t understand this, but this is kinda how negotiations work. One party comes in with a silly low offer, like a three-year DACA extension. Then the other party comes in with a silly high offer, like passing HR1. They meet in the middle, which would be, what? Permanent DACA legislation?

I agree that the Dems should offer wall funding in exchange for HR1 as a counter offer. And for folks saying “what happened to ‘no negotiations!’”, the answer is, for me at least, I never said “no negotiations” - I said “don’t negotiate against ourselves”. So if Trump makes an actual proposal, like he is claimed to be planning, then a counter-offer/negotiation is perfectly reasonable.

The problem was, Trump was demanding “negotiations” but what he meant were concessions - surrender, not exchanges. If he’s now willing to start trading some horses, well we got plenty O horses. But we ain’t givin’ our horses away for free.

No, Democrats are exactly where they need to be.

Trump can’t actually make an offer. So whatever he proposes has to go through the Senate.

Ok, the Senate passes a bill funding government, with $5 billion for the wall and DACA extension.

Now the House passes a bill funding government, with $2 billion for the wall and a pathway to citizenship.

Obviously the two sides disagree. Republicans will complain about how the Democrats are holding up their bill for the sake of immigrants. Democrats will reply that Republicans are holding up their bill for the sake of an extra $3 billion for a wall that nobody wants.

The shutdown drags on, and (as usual) Trump gets most of the blame.

It eventually ends with a bill that funds government, either with everyone mostly getting what they want, or nobody getting what they want.

It’s also worth noting the breezy ignoring of what actually has happened in this apparent “Lemme dunk on these guys!” post.

First off, Democrats expressed a willingness to deal. They were given three different vectors of negotiation – DACA, partial funding, and reopen and negotiate – all three carried to the party by persons apparently speaking on behalf of Donald Trump. Within hours, and in some cases less than an hour, of those proposals becoming public, the President shot all three down.

It’s tough to negotiate in that setting.

Pelosi holds the strong negotiating standing. She and the Democrats have shown a willingness to negotiate, even as they send funding bill after funding bill to the Senate. But until the other side is willing to give an inch, if you’re the high bidder why bid higher and bid against yourself? Better to see what the White House will propose – and this time make sure it comes from Trump himself, since his surrogates apparently no longer speak for him in this regard.

And now Trump has finally actually entered negotiation. And now I would expect Pelosi – who knows how to shift the narrative game pretty well herself – to counter-propose something, because now the other side has expressed a willingness to give and take, rather than just float trial proposals for an hour that the boss hates.

Stephen Miller’s idea of compromise.

It’s worth noting the breezy ignoring of what was actually said by this…I don’t know exactly what. Complaint that I’m bringing back up a topic that was dismissed out of hand earlier? Disagree if you want (and clearly I’m in the minority here) but that statement looks like an attack on me, not the content.

I said Democrats would have been better off controlling the narrative on negotiation. They are clearly not doing this, or else we’d have Trump responding to a Democratic proposal. Instead we get articles like “Pressure builds on freshman Democrats to deliver on promise to end gridlock” (from that noted conservative outlet NPR).

I never said Trump would negotiate in good faith - we all know he won’t - or that Democrats didn’t make overtures. (If you can call sending effectively the same bill over and over an overture…didn’t we rag on Republicans for the same thing over Obamacare? And like those repeal-Obamacare bills, they’re being mostly ignored by mass media. You might hear one mentioned in passing on the nightly news, but usually not even that.) What I said is that during this shutdown fight, they didn’t ever actually offer to give him the win he wants in exchange for items on the Democratic agenda (even if we know he will reject them).

Now I see a suggestion that they do exactly this, and the only thing that’s changed is Trump making an announcement. That means he’s controlling the narrative flow here, an opportunity the Democrats had but did not seize. I certainly hope Pelosi and every other Democrat do a good job with their reactions to this and it turns out to be terrible for Trump. But in my opinion, they’d have had better opportunity if they made him react to them, not the other way around.

I like Nate Silver’s suggestion too. I would gladly trade a worthless wall for measures that would genuinely help democracy and reduce corruption.

And if they only give them 5 billion this year, a bunch of that is gonna be spent on non-stupid stuff (i.e. not a wall), and then they can just reduce the funding later.

The key difference between the 2018 shutdown, where the Dems had to cave because the Republicans could frame as “They want to keep the government shut down for illegals!” and THIS shutdown is that the Democrats are the party in the majority in the House.

That gives them leverage and flexibility in response that they didn’t have before.