House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's last-ditch plan to keep the government temporarily open has collapsed. Friday's vote a day before the deadline makes a government shutdown almost certain.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s last-ditch plan to keep the federal government temporarily open collapsed in dramatic fashion Friday as a robust faction of hard-right holdouts rejected the package, making a shutdown almost certain.
McCarthy’s right-flank Republicans refused to support the bill despite its steep spending cuts of nearly 30% to many agencies and severe border security provisions, calling it insufficient.
The White House and Democrats rejected the Republican approach as too extreme. The vote was 198-232, with 21 hard-right Republicans voting to sink the package. The Democrats voted against it.
Why is it whenever a govt shutdown almost anything bad in government occurs it’s because of Republicans?
I didn't used to think like this and I didn't used to be so one sided in my political thinking, but events from 2016 on have turned me into a 100% Democrat voter. I always was for presidential elections but I used to consider more nuance in local elections and actually read the positions before voting. Now I don't even bother. Democrats are not without sin but I'm always going to vote for the party that at least pays lip service to social improvement instead of greed being the core value of the party.
Ranked choice voting and more than 2 parties would be the best situation but until we get that I'm straight down the ballot with the lesser of two evils.
I'm the exact same way. The first election I voted in was Bush v Gore. Then and for nearly two decades later, I would look closely at each candidate no matter the party, and vote for the best candidate. I tended to vote for the Democrat more often, but was never a straight down ballot voter, especially for state and local elections.
At this point though, the (R) next to someone's name on the ballot is so toxic that I won't even consider them. They've all drunken the MAGA Koolaid and are doing everything they can to destroy our government and rip up the Constitution in the name of Trump. Maaaaaaaaaybe if I saw someone with balls to standup and say "hey, I'm a Republican but all this Trump worship has gone too far" then I would consider them. But that's not the case here. Everyone running on the Republican ticket in my area has Trump's balls in and around their mouth, so I will vote straight (D) for the next several years.
Because Republicans campaign on the principal of "government is inept" and do everything they can to make it so. They're literally trying to destroy it from within to make their claim true.
Their motivation for destroying the government is their corporate funders. A weak government means corporations have more freedom to truly fuck over their customers and workers.
Money is their God and country.
Edit - I forgot to include their extremist faction's motivation since Trump took the wheel. Foreign funders. Russia and China have Trump, and therefore the MAGA faction, in their pocket.
There's a quote from P.J. O'Rourke that illustrates the point well:
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
A central tenant of the Democratic Party is that government can be a force for good and should be run well. Republicans try to tear the government down, especially at the federal level. The party as a whole doesn't care nearly as much about good governance principles, though there are of course exceptions.
It’s because of the Two Santa’s Problem. Republicans figured out in the 1970’s they couldn’t get elected competing with Democrats who want to expand social programs. They then adopted the strategy of saying the government doesn’t work, defunding it so that the self fulfilling prophecy comes true and they can be a Santa by giving tax cuts for the programs they defund.
defunding it so that the self fulfilling prophecy comes true and they can be a Santa by giving tax cuts for the programs they defund.
This is giving them slightly too much credit. They don't even shrink the government and pass the savings back to the American people. They continually grow the government, just like Democrats, however they have no mechanism to fund it because they also always support tax cuts. That's why the deficit and the debt tend to grow even larger under their governance. That's the two santas: government freebies and tax cuts both. Billions for defense contractors while we're also giving Mr Private Jet a tax write-off.
Republicans are always the cause of it and yet they all shout afterwards that it's the democrat's fault. At this point, I'd be surprised if any republican politician ever told the truth once.