Funding health care for illegal aliens is extremely unpopular, so the Dems do really own this.
But another thing to consider when it comes to this shutdown is the internal party politics at play. Chuck Schumer is fighting to keep control of the Dems. Apparently, the radical faction of the Dems is driving for this shutdown. Schumer is afraid that he'll lose his position if he doesn't play ball with the radicals. I don't know what his strategy is going to be. Maybe he'll keep up his tough posture while allowing other Dem senators to break ranks to get him off the hook? That way he can save face.
(Anybody who thinks this is just fanfiction can read Speaker Johnson's post about this.)
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Funding health care for illegal aliens is extremely unpopular, so the Dems do really own this.
But another thing to consider when it comes to this shutdown is the internal party politics at play. Chuck Schumer is fighting to keep control of the Dems. Apparently, the radical faction of the Dems is driving for this shutdown. Schumer is afraid that he'll lose his position if he doesn't play ball with the radicals. I don't know what his strategy is going to be. Maybe he'll keep up his tough posture while allowing other Dem senators to break ranks to get him off the hook? That way he can save face.
(Anybody who thinks this is just fanfiction can read Speaker Johnson's post about this.)
Ver archivo adjunto 7989761
I can explain this a bit more, being someone familiar with how lefty politics of the area tends to roll.
Schumer is a rare case. While I (and indeed, a great many on both sides) cannot stand the man, he's an odd case of a very savvy politician in my home state. Or at least, he used to be - before he and his associates very foolishly cozied up to the progressives and their socialist buddies thinking that it would be a particularly good way to shut down the rabble-rousers from Gen X.
Then 2008 happened. Obama got in, and the Dems had an overwhelming advantage. The shitheads in the moral majority had been totally discredited (somehow them mutating into the self-appointed fun police didn't work so well for them), the right was in disarray, and general consensus was that it was going to be a full electoral cycle before the Repubs could even manage a cogent response. The problem? After they got in, the Dems, believing they now held a lock on things, gave out power to a lot of their understudies, believing that they were doing so in a way that was low-risk. Give a couple of noisy shitheads some token positions and tone down the sperging for a while, that kind of thing.
The problem is that giving a noisy shithead power is basically enabling them, and after 2008, they saw the situation as "we're getting everything we want, so fuck everyone else." They acted like complete assholes at the community and local level, and this spread up to the state level - alienating a ton of moderates who hadn't really ever voted for a Democrat before because they genuinely believed the Obama hype. Cut to 2010, and the Dems lose their lock on power due to the DNC having major internal problems and there being gargantuan blast-back to shit Obama's administration had done, like the ACA (because we all like being forced at economic gunpoint to have junk insurance and to pay out most if not all of our yearly tax refund for not having something we can't fucking afford even with the exchanges).
With Gen X mostly fucking off to caucus with Republicans, as they realized that the Dems will throw every single possible roadblock to not give them a single concession, this made the Dems beholden to the ones that remained - the progs and socialist-types. Unfortunately, that leaves fuckers like Schumer in quite the predicament. They cozied up to the progressives for easy power, thinking they'd be more controllable than my generation, who was already chafing after years of inaction by them, only for the progressives to be more predictable, but a billion times worse in terms of what they'd demand.
While Trump was in office the first time, a shared enemy kept these disparate dem factions mostly coherent and on-focus, but after he left in 2020, the Progs did exactly what they did in 2008: "We got what we needed, and we're in charge, so we're getting what we want, fucking try to stop us." And without the Donald around to give them a collective target, they did what they usually do and immediately engaged in infighting. The hard-left is costing the Dems elections, because none of their positions are tenable outside blue-state HQ districts. The smart thing to do would be a pivot towards the center - away from the fringe that is actively fucking them over - but the Dems spent so long cozying up to these clowns that they forgot that failure to do as they say courts them pulling for their own insane political picks at the local level - something that was a big issue with groups like Justice Democrats and and the DSA primarying politicians they saw as insufficiently progressive, and now results in shitheads like Mamdani.
Which is why suddenly the lifer-types like Schumer are in a bit of a snit: If they want to
not lose above the micro level, they have to appeal to the mainstream voter, but doing that means a step away from the fringe who will treat that shit as a betrayal. Some local Dem politicians in NY, like Suozzi, correctly saw the writing on the wall
ages ago and pivoted accordingly, but the triangulating fucks like Schumer who cynically tried to weaponize these fucks while actively keeping them at bay don't have any remaining wiggle room.
