Stop the embarrassment
The longest such stoppage on record. Blame President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats for choosing stubbornness over compromise. These shutdowns get more respect than they deserve— they’re mutual failures of governance.
It’s embarrassing. There’s no more fundamental responsibility of elected officials than keeping the lights on.
You know the politics behind this shutdown: Trump wants a wall on the southern border to prevent immigrants from entering the United States without permission. He’s defined his presidency as a quest to build the wall, without ever holding to specifics about what it would look like. Yet he demands $5.7 billion in wall financing or he’ll allow the government to stay partially shuttered. Democrats, newly in control of the House and sensing Trump’s political weakness, refuse to budge on their stance that the wall is immoral.
OK, if a border barrier is immoral, what’s a shutdown? Unethical. There are 800,000 federal employees hit by the shutdown, about evenly divided between those at home without pay and those on the job but not receiving their paychecks.
Neither Trump and congressional Republicans nor the Democrats look capable. Both sides have boxed themselves in. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is waiting out Trump, hoping he’ll crack. She doesn’t want to lose the first battle of her second tenure in leadership. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t trying to corral Republicans because he sees no proposal Trump would endorse. On Monday the president turned down a suggestion to reopen the government for a three-week negotiating period. “I’m not looking to call a national emergency,” Trump said, repeating a draconian threat. “This is so simple you shouldn’t have to.”
He’s right. It shouldn’t be this hard. There are solutions to craft, including one we endorsed last week that would see money for Trump’s wall (or “border security,” if you’re a Democrat), in exchange for an agreement to maintain the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for the thousands of young immigrants known as Dreamers.
If Trump, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, including Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, don’t like that compromise, they had better find another. Right now, the lot of them look incompetent.