You see an ideological range of people, lefties to mods, in and out of the Senate, who have no such reverence for the ridiculous, outlier institution of the filibuster and are reacting with incredulity at the sight of copartisans folding amidst visible Republican flailing. /end

Key Democrats, to their discredit, preferred to blow a winning hand than to risk the GOP actually having to *take* that responsibility.

Trump was absolutely right to see the proper endgame of the shutdown as the GOP ending this farce by finally going nuclear on approps and taking actual responsibility for governing. And Senate Republicans didn't *want* that responsibility.

Stay peaceful, disciplined, and confident, and make this huge. www.nokings.org

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Cringy 2017 protest-brunch energy matters a lot right now. Trump has used deployment in four cities as a provocation of violence & further crackdown. With protestors largely staying disciplined, he's been failing. A day of nationally distributed, localized, peaceful protests drives the failure home.

He's gish-galloped himself.

d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ec...

The Dems can't abide that, but they've been reluctant to actually bring themselves to say any of it out loud. It's bracing to see a House member at least start to do so. /end

What the GOP position boils down to is that a few Dems should be made to eat shit and affirmatively vote for a bad-faith bill that's substantively objectionable and guaranteed to be reneged-on thru rescission and impoundment--*even though those votes are not actually necessary.*

But what's genuinely crazy-making is that even that leverage is in a true sense illusory. At any moment it's in the Republicans' power to jettison the 60-vote requirement and pass whatever they want.

Dems are in the minority across the board. They're feeling intense pressure to "fight," which means shutting down the entire govt via the one thin piece of leverage they have--the weird supermajority requirement for cloture on appropriations votes. It's a weak position to be in.

Divided government presents a perfectly legible clash of democratic mandates--"the people gave us control of the House to check this president!" "I'm your president and will stand up to extremists in Congress!" But right now Republicans have unified control of the government.

It hasn't penetrated the discourse sufficiently how unusual it is to be in a shutdown-via-filibuster. All the major past shutdowns have stemmed from divided party control of govt. (Though Trump's weird border-wall shutdown started in the lame duck just prior to divided govt.)

But the vibe *I’m* perceiving from “Dems need to fight” types seems surprisingly congenial to this position. It has the benefit of being true and making sense: We can’t make a deal with you because you’re going to reneg, so go ahead and take ownership of your own terrible budget.

No Senate Dem wants to say that because they want to talk about the popular substantive demands they’re making instead—and presumably because they think that explicitly welcoming the GOP’s filibuster-nuking will be seen as abdication by their base.