Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but the fascist conservatives in the House want to shut down the government. Yes, again. This time, they’re in a tantrum over Donald Trump getting arrested for his many alleged crimes. The party of law and order, people!
Let me explain: If you thought we were out of the woods with a shutdown when the House Republicans decided to stop being babies and actually do their job and extend the debt ceiling, that was unfortunately incorrect because we’re back here again. Every year, the House must pass a spending bill that essentially keeps the entire federal government operating, and now, some of the ghouls who were elected by people who clearly don’t know better are threatening not to pass the bill. Per NBC News:
Four criminal indictments of Donald Trump have ignited his followers and spurred his House Republican allies to try and use the upcoming government funding deadline of Sept. 30 as leverage to undermine the prosecutions.
The bad news for them: A government shutdown wouldn’t halt the criminal proceedings against the former president.
Yep, that’s right, these people don’t even know how to do the job they were hired to do poorly! So keep that in mind the next time you’re applying for a job. If it won’t hold back an awful person in Congress from trying to usurp the government from functioning because people are doing their jobs correctly, don’t let it hold you back from applying for a position above your station, either.
The incompetence and corruption here is staggering. You may be wondering, what’s an insurrectionist party to do when you can’t shut down the government to stop your leader from going on trial for crimes that he allegedly committed in full public view of the entire world? If you said attack the Biden administration, you are correct! Per the above source:
The GOP desire to use Congress’ “power of the purse” to defend Trump, who is running for president again, took hold over the last two months and escalated after the latest indictment in Atlanta in connection with the ex-president’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat based on fabricated claims of fraud.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is pushing to cut off funding for [DOJ Special Counsel Jack] Smith’s office, which has indicted Trump in the Jan. 6 criminal investigation and a Florida case over his handling of classified documents. “The House of Representatives must defund Jack Smith’s office and end the witch hunt,” Gaetz said in a statement. Another Trump ally who has the ear of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., is supporting that push.
To be clear, it’s likely this will not stop the Republicans from trying to shut down the government with the spending bill either. They’re awful and love to sow discord. They will merely have to come up with another fake reason to do so in order to justify it, which is laughable because why bother with pretense anymore? The slimebuckets who support them don’t need one, and everyone else sees through the stunt for what it is, anyway.
Look, I don’t particularly hold any of our Founding Fathers in high regard, mainly because they believed only white landowners should be allowed to vote; however, I’m extremely confident basically any one of them, if they could rise from the grave, would slap the s*** out of anyone trying to weaponize government spending against the judicial branch. The entire situation is infuriating. Also, does anyone else notice that the GOP is acting as if Trump is guilty and thus needs defending, as opposed to operating under the assumption he’s innocent and throwing their might behind his legal defense fund? These idiots always tell on themselves.
If you want to see how far the discourse has fallen around “defunding our DOJ is bad simply because you don’t like them trying to hold Trump accountable,” look no further than this paragraph from NBC News:
In the Senate, Appropriations Vice Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, recently said, “Reforms may be needed, but I strongly oppose defunding the FBI and the Department of Justice.”
That’s right, “not defunding the FBI and DOJ” is now a political stance elected officials are having to take. (And it’s about the most we can ever expect from Susan Collins.) Whatever this is, we all agree we’re in the worst timeline right now, yes?
Where are the Democrats in all of this? Well, they’ve now had to take the stance that the only other major political party in this country should not be interfering with trials. I wish I was joking, but again, here we are:
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said the four indictments show “a repeated pattern of criminal activity by the former president.”
In a recent joint statement, the two top Democrats urged Trump, as well as his supporters and critics, to “allow the legal process to proceed without outside interference.”
NBC News
So with all of this in mind, you’d think a government shutdown would be unlikely, yes? Since the Republicans can’t defund the DOJ or the state jurisdictions where Trump’s trials are to be held. Ha, that would require logic and a desire to avoid chaos, two qualities the Republicans in control are no longer known for.
Instead, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is exploring the opportunity to impeach President Biden, in earnest, and is between a rock and a hard place satiating the hard-right wackos who are demanding deep spending cuts. Per The Hill:
“The leverage doesn’t exist” to substantially reduce the top-line spending number Biden and McCarthy agreed to earlier this year, or to add a House-passed border security bill or to crack down on the Department of Justice for prosecuting former President Trump, [former Senior GOP aide David] Cleary said.
Senate Republican aides say their isn’t any appetite within the Senate GOP conference to push spending bills that don’t have any chance of picking up enough Democratic votes to overcome the chamber’s usual 60-vote threshold.
“I don’t think anybody supports a government shutdown,” a Senate Republican aide said. “But the House is something we don’t have much control over, if any.
So to paraphrase one of my favorite tweets ever, we’re at the point where the Titanic is sinking, the band is continuing to play and Billy Zane is running around with a gun. A shutdown is deemed more “likely this year than not” by Goldman Sachs, The Speaker of the House is more concerned with impeaching the president over nothing than doing his job, and the Republicans don’t really care to avert any of it.
Ah, another normal day in the American political discourse. Just please remember to vote in the 2024 elections. It really is a choice between a party that wants to govern and another that wants to treat America as its own personal slush fund. Really, that shouldn’t be a choice at all.
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
