We Got Two More Years of This

We have two more years of this…fighting, hostage taking, cliff hangers. It feels like the government shutdown is a harbinger of what’s to come and the recent fight was an unnecessary shutdown. What Trump did was not a negotiating tactic but a hostage-taking tactic: kind of like someone who, when he feels like life is not giving him what he wants and feels powerless and desperate, takes extreme action such as hostage taking with a gun to the head to get what he wants. Trump, to get what he wants, had to use the suffering of the American people.

You just can’t use people lives and livelihood for your negotiation. Do that and it becomes hostage taking. And isn’t hostage taking a crime?

This whole fight displayed a couple of things:

1. He has no negotiating skills. Instead he is just a bully.
2. The millionaires sitting in his cabinet are out of touch with the plight of the American people. Borrow money? Are you kidding me? What kind of advice is that? A minor pain that our future generations will thank them for? So their kids will thank them for falling into bankruptcy, through no fault of their own, and thus possibly consigning them to poverty for life? And they get an additional vacation time out of this?
3. Republican senators are cowards and we cannot look to them for inspiring leadership.
4. The Freedom House caucus and other hard right, which seems to support holding on to the shutdown, can best be described as cruel.
5. Federal government workers do provide valuable service: air traffic controllers help planes navigate the airways; food inspectors help protect us from food-borne diseases; FBI, CIA, coast guards and border patrol safeguard our security, to name a few. So shrinking the government is talk about getting rid of valuable service that many people depend upon – and not just the poor.

Someone joked that the reason why the shutdown ended was because Trump’s rich friends no longer could fly out of either the Washington DC or New York airports due to the shutting down of the airports (too many air controllers absent from their job).

The shutdown is over but only temporarily. The funding is a 3 week stay, at the end of which, we hope Congress can come up with an immigration agreement that the House, Senate and the president can sign off on. I’m not sure how though. We’ve been having immigration discussions for many years, so I’m dubious that in 3 weeks Congress will come up with a solutions that they haven’t been able to for many years.

So, after 3 weeks, we may be going through this again. Will we have a shutdown again and will it last longer than 35 days? I don’t know but I’m dreading it. Frankly, I think the federal workers should try to find another job for the duration of the Trump administration, and maybe even the duration of all Republican administrations until Trumpism dies out.

And, let’s not forget, later on in the year, we will be facing the debt ceiling battles.