Shutting down the government

I was going to write a post about how much cooperation the Democrats should give the Fascist Party to avoid a government shutdown next month, but Murc saved me the trouble in a comment below, in response to a comment about how I thought we were against government shutdowns:

I don’t know how to explain to you that “we are in the midst of a major crisis where fascists are illegally and with malice aforethought smashing apart the government and conducting purges and witch hunts, and only the fact that they’re unable to govern without our help provides us leverage” is different than “Republicans want to shut’er down and default on the debt because they want to vandalize society” other than simply saying it directly.

And to be clear, we are in fact still against government shutdowns and not raising the debt limit. But you know what we’re against more? Lawless coups! We are, and should be, in favor of “we expect our elected representatives to hurl themselves into the gears of government until the criming stops.”

You seem to be taking the position of “sure, Trump is engaged in a grotesque crime wave and monstrous illegality as he impounds funds and purges the government, but we should support the Republicans in passing bills anyhow!” If this is so, you are wrong. If it is not so, I don’t know what you’re saying.

The Democrats’ position ought to be: Zero cooperation of any kind with the Trump administration until the Trump administration stops its current lawless takeover of the machinery of the state. That means at a minimum that the Elon Youth are expelled from all government buildings and positions, all court orders are obeyed to the letter, nobody is illegally fired, etc. etc.

This of course would cause endless whining from your modal reactionary centrist about how the Dems are Just As Bad As the GOP, to which the reply should be shut the fuck up you useless fascist enabler y tu puta madre tambien (for a little bilingual DEI flavor).

Now if the Dems hold firm here, one of two things happen:

(1) Trump folds, while of course claiming that he won the biggest victory anyone has ever won, and that Mike Johnson came to him with tears in his eyes and said Sir thank you for saving America, and so forth.

(2) There’s a shutdown, at which point the most likely course of action is that Trump and his minions go even more rogue than they have up to this point, declaring that the government isn’t shut down because under the Inherent Power Doctrine found in Article XIII and the good parts of the Bible the president can just order the government to stay open. At which point who knows what happens, but quite literally anything is better than any cooperation with what’s happening now.

The key here is that the Democrats have a very simple and clear message about all this, which is the Republicans control all three political branches of the government, so if the government shuts down it’s 100% on them. It’s not our job to save you from yourselves, and we won’t unless you stop the autogolpe now, not next week sometime pinky promise.

Now under even vaguely normal political conditions, a government shutdown is a bad thing, but we left normal a long time ago, and in terms of desirability the actual options here are Trump folds >>>Government shutdown>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Democrats fold and keep government open while Elon Musk continues to wipe his Nazi ass with the Constitution and the Gettysburg address.

Time to go all in on the river.