The news is now in. The Senate has cleared the way for the Continuing Resolution passed by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, and President Trump is, reportedly, "takihg a victory lap." When I began writing this blog posting, yesterday, the Senate had not yet taken action on the Continuing Resolution. Despite the fact that the Senate has now acted, there may still be some importance in going through this blog posting, despite the finality of what the Senate has done. There is undoubtedly some importance in thinking about "the next three months."
Congress Member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (pictured) went on television to urge Democrats in the Senate to refuse to vote for a Continuing Resolution sent to the Senate by the Republican majority in the House. The Continuing Resolution (CR) would fund governmental operations through September. Procedurally, the Democrats in the Senate had the ability to deny approval, even though the Republicans have a majority in the Senate. A Senate "filibuster" could have killed the Continuing Resolution in the Senate. The "upside" of killing the Continuing Resolution would have been a chance to mitigate or avoid the damage that could be done by the Trump Administration, using the funding and related authority provided by the CR. The "downside" of killing the Continuing Resolution is that such an action by the Democrats might have triggered a full-on government shutdown, with both real and political bad effects.
Various Democrats in the Senate, including Senator Chuck Schumer, who heads the Senate Democratic Caucus, were not willing to shut down the government, and voted for the Continuing Resolution.
Click the following link, at the end of this paragraph, to hear from commentator Steve Schmidt ("The Warning"), who expresses himself in even more emphatic terms than Ocasio-Cortez.
A blog I follow, Empty Wheel, discussing this division within the Democratic Party, published the following comment yesterday. This comment, posted before the Senate vote, says that the decision, whichever way it goes, should not be made by way of trying to achieve some sort of partisan political "win." Note, particularly, how this comment begins:
Democracy will be preserved or lost in the next three months. And democracy will be won or lost via a nonpartisan political fight over whether enough Americans want to preserve their way of life to fight back, in a coalition that includes far more than Democrats. You win this fight by treating Trump and Elon as the villain, not by making any one Democrat a hero (or worse still, squandering week after week targeting Democratic leaders while letting Elon go ignored).
And Democrats, on both sides of this fight, are not fighting that fight. I’ve seen none of the most powerful voices — not AOC, not Bernie, not Jasmine Crockett, not Tim Walz, not Pete Buttigieg — put out a video talking about the fight over impoundment, about the stakes of having elected representatives of both parties fight for funding for their own constituents.
Democrats who want a shutdown have done none of the messaging to those already hurt by Trump’s power grab work to make it a short term political win, to explain the tie between right wing capitulation to Trump and services shutting down. Instead, they’ve been fighting among themselves, mobilizing politically active Democrats.
I get the anger with Schumer — though I do think his concerns about the courts need to be taken very seriously.
But until Democrats stop thinking in terms of their own leadership in Congress but instead think exclusively about winning the political fight with people being hurt, not as Democrats, but as people opposed to fascism, they’re going to be looking for power in the wrong places.
Three months? That's what we've got?
We ("the people") - as in "We, the people" - cannot stand by and let our dysfunctional politics result in the sacrifice of our democratic system of self-government. And we can't rely on our political parties to stand in for us. We are going to have to make clear - all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike - that our national commitment to democratic self-government is not a "partisan" affair, and that neither "party" can be trusted to preserve democratic self-government, as a commitment by that "party."
If that three-month prediction is anywhere near true, our personal engagement in how our government operates, and what it does, must come soon. It must come clearly, and it must come soon!
Image Credit:
https://youtu.be/3nLnFWBcHTg?si=ACCCiMQa7kOHG86u
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