What's Really Behind the Shutdown: the GOP's Immoral Priorities

[Celerity]

The tired punditry of shutdown politics isn’t adequate to the task of illustrating Republican villainy. Democrats will have to shout about it.

https://newrepublic.com/article/201032/government-shutdown-gop-immoral-priorities

https://archive.ph/MpN1p


President Donald Trump with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

The ins and outs of government shutdown politics have come to bore and even offend me, as if all that’s at stake when the government shuts down is which party manages to escape blame. That type of coverage of shutdowns—especially these days, with one of our two parties having become a cowardly and highly regimented personal army of one man, which means it’s the more disciplined party, which may in turn help it “win”—is the moral equivalent of covering the Nanjing Massacre by marveling over the efficiency of the Japanese Imperial Army.

What does interest me, since I’ve raised the matter of morality, is the real, deeper reason this shutdown is happening. This isn’t about Obamacare subsidies. I mean, sure: They are part of the discussion. But there is something much more vital at stake here. This shutdown is happening because the aforementioned party of dictatorship wants it to happen so it can destroy the federal government and vastly reduce the number of things it does for people. It’s happening because Donald Trump’s Republican Party is depraved.

If you find my language a tad overheated, then masticate on this more anodyne description, which appeared in a Washington Post news story over the weekend: “If Congress fails to fund the government next week, the White House is preparing for a shutdown that would reflect the purest version of President Donald Trump’s vision for the federal government, guided by White House budget director Russell Vought, an architect of the controversial Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second term.”

What that means, as the Post article and other news stories have sketched out, is massive layoffs in many departments and agencies, with the hope of making as many as possible permanent. The Trump White House wants to cut the State Department by 84 percent, the Department of Housing and Urban Development by 43 percent, and the Labor Department by 35 percent. If the government shuts down Tuesday night, it wants to furlough as many people as it can get away with.

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