Schumer not folding?
According to Punchbowl News, via Political Wire, Schumer sounds like he is going to hang tough in budget negotiations. I think it is possible Democrats could win a shutdown fight, although the most knowledgeable political observers disagree.
But if this is real, not political theater for angry base voters, then the Democrats should have a piece of legislation drafted that they can point to:
“We do not want a shutdown. Here is our budget bill, we can vote on it today . . . or we can negotiate a compromise between your legislation and ours.”
And the Democrats’ bill should cover election security, domestic use of the armed forces and National Guard, defunding ICE, protecting media (strip the FCC of the power to revoke broadcast licenses), protecting universities and vaccine availability, maintain sanctions on Russia and send weapons to Ukraine, raise top marginal tax rates, etc.
Shut it down …
Why won’t voters blame the Democrats for that?
@Jack,
Because, just like each and every other government shutdown under GOP leadership, the voters blamed Republicans.
But that’s just data.
Did you follow the link, watch the video?
It isn’t “casting blame”, it is “assigning responsibility”. The Retards just left town, a week short of the shutdown: on vacation, again. And the whole world, except for a willful few, sees it and knows who is responsible for the government ~ which isn’t working anyways ~ shut down
Historically, they have been responsible for every shutdown …
Is not supporting a filibuster on a bill or bills that you will vote against thought of as folding? The filibuster isn’t great negotiating leverage in many circumstances. The thought occurs to me that one reason there was little real pressure to move on from Schumer after all the outrage this spring could be because a good number of Senate Dems expect that it will have to be repeated this fall and at least one more time in 2026. Why not use the already damaged Schumer to soak up some more outrage instead of getting a second leader banged up?
@Joel,
Do you have a source for that? My limited research into the question yielded ambiguous results.
@Jack,
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/11/politics/shutdown-blame-polling
https://navigatorresearch.org/most-americans-would-blame-trump-and-republicans-in-congress-for-government-shutdown/
Thanks. I wonder if things would change with greater awareness.
@Jack,
In the age of the internet, awareness is easier to achieve than at any previous time in my long life.
And yet, it seems painfully slow.
Polling August 7-11 might not reflect actual sentiment during a shutdown on, say, October 15. In any case, I think if Democrats are inching towards using a filibuster with a resulting shutdown, it could be more interesting for AB to examine what Republicans in the Senate are likely to do. The headline to the post tells you about 90% of what’s important to understand about Democrats here: for fundamentally emotional reasons not filibustering Republicans budget bills would be thought of as surrender which sure is interesting coming from a party recently outraged by Sinema and Manchin keeping them from killing this Jim Crow relic. Heck those two aren’t even in the Senate any more. Eric K, you seem to be the go to guy on Congress here at AB, how about putting something together about Republican options here?