Blame

So once in a while you have a display of broken politics that doesn't entirely center on the Donald.  He's a player in this shutdown thing, but not the only one.  It displays his failing as a leader of men, but it is not directly his fault. His unpredictability and propensity to shift with the wind makes it tough for anyone on either side of the aisle to trust him, but they have had a year to adapt to this dysfunction so sympathy runs thin.
I live right outside of Washington D.C. and thus I know many people who are employed by the federal government.  The conversations yesterday were about who was going to work today.  "Are you essential?" I heard more than once. I know what it means, but it's still a little jarring to hear people talk that way, with such frustration about how little agency they have over their own livelihood. Again, I look at congress, and notice that most of them are wealthy, and they are still getting their salaries, and I think something is wrong with this picture.
But I am puzzled by something, and I guess I should expect this sort of slant and spin in this day and age, but it still seems shockingly obtuse even now: certain sources are trying to pin the shutdown on the Democrats, you know them minority, who couldn't keep the government open even when they had their man in the big chair.  This is a congress thing, so I'm actually going to let Trump off the hook for this one, as I did Obama when the GOP pulled this shenanigan before.  This is a political dice roll used by people who are increasingly afraid to compromise; the stakes are the paychecks of a lot of people I know, including the military personnel that everybody loves so much during the National Anthem.
Yes, the Democrats could totally cave on their demands regarding DACA and just join with the GOP to get things done, but the fact of the matter is, the best they can even hope for is just a continuation for another couple of weeks or months.  Congress has been kicking the budget can down the road for far too long, I think because both sides, at least the parts of both sides that retain contact with sanity, realize that actually passing a budget is going to require difficult and unpopular choices.  If you think the fight over discretionary spending is nasty wait until you see what happens when they have to deal with the fire breathing dragon that no one wants to wake up and have to set new priorities concerning non-discretionary spending.
I don't claim expertise in economics or in the passing of budgets on the federal scale, but I know this from passing a church budget every year: when your expenses exceed your revenue, for the necessities: mortgages, salaries, utilities, you absolutely cannot do everything you want to do, and hard choices are going to have to be made.  The bills that must be paid are non-discretionary things.  Like the government, churches passing budgets tend to focus on little things like the money we spend on office supplies, because we don't really have any control over the mortgage payment.  That is what the current government has been doing for the past several years, fighting over the cost of paper clip items like food stamps and even maybe the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), while whistling past the graveyard when it comes to the actual problems of Social Security, Medicare and other non-discretionary spending. For quite a while, mandatory spending has exceeded our revenue, this means that almost everything we hear argued about on the news is more or less not about balancing the budget, it is about how big a deficit we run.
Churches do this too, but we have the capability of under-spending our budget too, we also have the ability to rely on the generosity of our members, our savings and most crucially the grace of God to make it through.  The US Congress at this point has none of those things, but I will pray for God's grace to be upon them because it may be the only hope at this point.
What I am frustrated about this morning is the utter irresponsibility of the people up the road to let it come to this. They should have fixed this long ago.  I listened to conservative types rail about the deficit during the Obama years, especially when the Democrats had control of congress and the Oval office.  Funny thing now that they're holding the reigns that stuff doesn't seem to matter much.  Right now the GOP has all the power, they have majorities in both of the legislative houses and they control the executive branch (well sort of).  To gripe about how the minority won't totally cave to their demands is the behavior of a whiny bully who is upset that other kids won't fork over their lunch money.
The budget thing will probably work out, but our democratic processes are seriously endangered.  The danger comes from the idea that the majority gets to make the rules completely.  I will remind any conservative types who happen to read this, if majority rule were all that mattered you would have President Hillary Clinton right now.  Our Republic is a representative democracy because the wealthy white guys who wrote the constitution understood that they couldn't just share power equally.  They knew that somehow, someway the minority opinion needed to be heard, because it might just be theirs.  They rightfully feared the uneducated and ill-informed "masses," they were elites and elitist, but because they understood human nature fairly well, they wrote us this constitution that actually resists even their own worst impulses.
That's pretty freaking brilliant, and we could use some of that savvy up the road this week. Think about that before you blame the Democrats and call for doing away with the filibuster.