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

I would be interested to see a chart with debt ceiling as a percentage of GDP.

The first few minutes of Maddow’s show tonight made a good point about “One Neat Trick” to neuter the FBI’s ability to check on people’s financial situation as a way of assessing their vulnerability to bribery by crooks/hostile powers. Making FBI people work without pay would be one such neat trick. Worth watching.

In practice, I don’t think it would be substantially different than a chart of debt as a percentage of GDP. In practice, they always raise the debt ceiling to accommodate the amount of debt required by their spending bills. Occasionally, temporarily, they don’t as a kind of political brinksmanship, but then they do.

Edit: Yeah, that’s what it looks like.

Source: Understanding the National Debt and the Debt Ceiling - Taxpayers for Common Sense

A new hope?

Wouldn’t this just result in the Trump bill dying in the House and the House bill dying in the Senate, leaving us in the exact same place we are now?

Maybe the GOP is hoping the Democrats are stupid enough (they’re not!) to pass both bills in both chambers, leaving it up to the wisdom of Trump to decide which one is better for the country he loves so much.

Not if it goes to resolving differences between the bills in conference (my faint hope).

Seems more likely to me that the Trump Bill dies in the house and the house bill gets vetoed by the President. Surprising McConnell went for this, if I understand correctly. But at least the senate can e seen to be doing something.

Neither is going to work, and it’s political theater. The Senate won’t pass the clean CR from the House. The House won’t pass the Stephen Miller-laced bill the senate passes.

If Democrats get lucky and get some crossover, it’d be Murkowski, Gardner and Collins most likely. They’d need a 4th to get to 51.

The House bill could pass the Senate. They only need a handful of Republicans who are done with this farce. That might even be McConnell’s game here, to say that they put them both up for a vote and went with the one that had the most support, sorry Trump, We tried. Then the pressure is off the Senate Republicans and squarely on Trump. If he vetoes it’s very clear he alone is responsible and they might even have enough votes for an override at that point.

Or maybe he’s just hoping that Trump is too fucking dumb to know which one passed and will sign it thinkIng it’s his bill.

You still think there’s breathing room between Senate Republicans and Trump. There isn’t. McConnell knows that the House bill will fail. He will let a few people defect, but not enough to turn the tide.

To those who think Mitch McConnell has spent years breeding a subspecies of puppies for 100% of the maximum cuteness characteristics in a broad-spanning multigenerational study of cute metrics, cuteness genetic heritability, age-related cute peaking, etc., all for the sole purpose of raising each new generation of puppies to the age of maximum cuteness, then kicking them to death in his backyard: you’re pretty close.

You meant to write turtles, not puppies, right?

And neither bill will pass and nothing will change except that each side will then go to their respective mouthpieces and declare the other side at fault.

Do we have any idea which vote comes first? I think it will be distinctly worse to go first.

Per this, Trump’s plan goes first:

If it fails, I expect the odds go up somewhat for the three week CR (which still isn’t the Dem plan).

Yeah, I agree entirely with the Matt Fuller. I’m not expecting the clean CR to pass but I can see a scenario wherein it does. If it happens it won’t be because McConnell has suddenly discovered the virtue of serving his country first, it will be because he feels like it’s in his own interest to put this fucking mess behind him.

The IRS is calling in people for refresher training and telling them they will not be paid until this mess is over. They don’t have any choice or they will be unable to handle the load later on.

I read either bill needs 60 (presumably to stop a filibuster?). Neither will get that.