Social media queen Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) used her Twitter platform to defend journalists amid a series of sweeping layoffs across the media industry.

In a Saturday tweet, the freshman congresswoman cautioned that “the biggest threats to journalism right now are tech monopolies & concentration of ownership,” advocating for “high-quality journalism.”

Without a diversity of news outlets, she warned, “our democracy will continue to crumble.”

In a rambling Rose Garden statement, Trump still held out the threat of another shutdown when this bill runs out on Feb. 15. He also suggested he could invoke emergency powers to build his wall if the conference committee doesn’t come up with the funding. Neither is very likely. Support for Trump’s position has collapsed among Hill Republicans after Thursday’s votes demonstrated his weak position, and as the air traffic control system started more visibly eroding Friday morning. Given that, it’s hard to believe that Senate Republicans would shut down the government again, only to find themselves in exactly the same situation.

As for emergency powers, if Trump believed they were a good way to get what he wants, he likely would have already invoked them. It’s not just that there’s a very good chance the courts would reject him. Or that he would further alienate those, including many Republicans, who would consider it an abuse of power, an accusation Trump has to be particularly careful about as indictments of his former associates multiply. The even more immediate problem is that money spent by constitutionally dubious edict by the president without congressional appropriation has to come from someplace, and there are strong constituencies that will be very upset if he tries to take it (as has been floated already) from regular military spending or disaster relief.

Once again, the lesson is that government shutdowns are not some magical trump card that one side can play to force the other to surrender. In fact, as the third extended shutdown in U.S. history comes to an end, it’s obvious that whatever the ethics of harming the nation in order to win a policy battle might be, such a maneuver is entirely ineffective as a negotiating tactic. And yet Republicans -- the Newt Gingrich Republicans in 1995-1996, the Ted Cruz Republicans in 2013, and Trump and his supporters in 2018-2019 -- keep trying anyway. One would hope they have finally learned how futile it is.

Granted, this time, it seems to have just been Trump personally who thought it was a good idea, perhaps egged on by a few House Freedom Caucus members. Other Republicans believed (correctly or not) that they were simply trapped into going along. Perhaps they were right; maybe if they had ended this in December or in early January Trump would have turned his scorn on them and caused them greater political trouble than they endured.

President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on Sunday said it's "possible" that president spoke to his former attorney Michael Cohen ahead of his congressional testimony.

"Which would be perfectly normal," Giuliani told CNN's "State of the Union." "So what?"

When the Framers enshrined the freedom of press into the Constitution, they understood that journalists are an essential component of democracy. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter in 1787.

The role of the press has not changed since. Journalists remain the “custodians of conscience” in the United States, said Theodore Glasser, professor emeritus of communication at Stanford University, in an interview with the HPR. They “look for violations of the moral order … the norms concerning what’s right and wrong.”

Over half a century ago, the researchers Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril identified a paradox in American public opinion that largely holds true today. Most Americans, they argued, were “ideologically conservative” but “operationally liberal” when it came to their beliefs about government. People liked the idea of limited government in the abstract, believing they could and should be able to get along without government’s help. But when you asked them about the specific things government does, it turned out that they liked just about all of them, and thought government should spend as much or more to keep performing those tasks.

This contradiction, and the persistence of that abstract belief in small government, is in large part what allows Republicans — whose positions on policy issues are mostly unpopular — to stay competitive and hold on to power. But the partial shutdown of the federal government is giving all of us a vivid demonstration of what government actually does. By taking it away.