Oct
1
2025

Don't Worry Baby

Everything Will Turn Out All Right

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(paid link)

Well, I'm splitting time today between (1) blogging and (2) shoring up Pun Salad Manor's defenses against roving bands of youths prowling the anarchistic streets of Rollinsford NH. (Fortunately, I stocked up on boiling oil at Manor Depot before they ran out.)

But there's a lot of interesting shutdown stuff out there. Let's look at some of it. Over at Reason, J.D. Tuccille wonders: Could this be the best government shutdown ever?. (We hope that Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn't apply.)

Here we go again. As I write, politicians are trying to gin up a new panic over a looming "government shutdown." We've seen this before as Democrats and Republicans play chicken over their clashing funding priorities, with a partial suspension of federal activities threatened if they can't come to a deal.

Unfortunately, the government never really shuts down, and the two parties always work out an agreement that involves spending a lot more money. The worst that happens is that some people are inconvenienced for a few days, as the only things that really cease to function are public-facing operations such as parks and offices—deliberately so, to maintain the illusion that something important is happening. What might be different this time, though, is that there's a chance to use the impasse to reduce the federal work force.

Trump did make some noise along those lines. Unfortunately, for him, every day is potentially TACO Tuesday. So we'll see.

David Harsanyi is optimistic that the Ds are headed for humiliating defeat, as he explains Chuck Schumer’s bad shutdown bet.

Conventional D.C. wisdom maintains that the side pushing for passing a clean continuing resolution as a stopgap to fund the government is typically the party that can make a more coherent winning argument.

Well, the Republican-led House already passed a “clean” continuing resolution, maintaining government funding until November. Yet Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) now demand Republicans preemptively extend sunsetting COVID-era Obamacare subsidies.

To put the situation in context, imagine Democrats extending expiring GOP tax cuts in a continuing resolution. Or, better yet, imagine them acquiescing to Republican demands to cut Obamacare subsidies. There is simply no alternative universe in which any of that happens. We all know it.

Veronique de Rugy is more scornful of both sides; it's a Self-Inflicted Shutdown Mess. (archive.today link)

The clean CR, put together by House and Senate Republicans working with President Trump, extends funding for seven weeks at the exact levels already set under President Biden and extended under President Trump earlier this year. Over at the Economic Policy Innovation Center, Brittany Madni points out that Democrats are trying to pretend that the House CR isn’t really “Biden spending levels,” even though legislative history makes it obvious that it is. As she shows, both the December 2024 CR signed by Biden and the March 2025 CR signed by Trump carried forward the FY 2024 Biden minibuses. The numbers are Biden’s. To pretend otherwise is nonsense. As Madni notes, only a single Democrat in each chamber, Representative Jared Golden (D., Maine) and Senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.), broke ranks and voted yes.

It also means that these are the same spending levels both parties accepted in March. If these numbers were fine then, they are fine now. As an aside, I agree with my colleague Jack Salmon that these numbers are far from ideal in that they are evidence of a Congress that doesn’t understand the dire fiscal impasse we are heading toward. But, unfortunately, the best responsible option isn’t on the table (whether it will ever be on the table is a question for another day). In that universe, the second best will have to do.

Yet Democrats in the Senate blocked the clean CR because leadership wants to leverage the deadline into a demand for an additional $1.5 trillion in permanent spending. They want expanded ACA subsidies and various welfare expansions. None of this has anything to do with keeping the lights on, and it only exacerbates our perilous fiscal situation.

As long as my Social Security check gets deposited, and I don't run out of boiling oil to dump on those teeming hordes outside the battlements …

Jim Geraghty is also even-handed: Who will win the shutdown fight? Neither side will like the answer.. (WaPo gifted link)

We are probably about to enter a government shutdown that both President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats are convinced they are going to win.

Many Americans would prefer that the federal government keep operating, with no disruption to the usual activity and continued access to national parks. They’d prefer not to see news reports about students having their field trip to the Smithsonian museums canceled. There’s no good reason both parties can’t pass a short-term extension at current funding levels while they hash out a longer-term deal.

Sure, the parties can point to polling indicating that the public blames the opposition more than themselves, but very few elected officials exit a government shutdown with their reputation enhanced, and there’s always a significant chunk of Americans who conclude, “a plague o’ both your houses.”

Jim, I concluded that years ago.

And there's apparently some disagreement about whether the Ds want to provide “free healthcare for illegals” in their demands for reopening government. The Rs say yes, and the Ds say that's a despicable lie. Matt Margolis does a pretty good job explaining the R-side argument: Yes, Democrats Shut Down the Government to Give Illegals Free Healthcare.

Just because illegal immigrants aren’t technically eligible for Obamacare subsidies doesn’t mean they weren’t getting them anyway. In fact, California became the first state to offer health insurance to all illegal immigrants in December 2023.

“Starting Jan. 1, [2024], all undocumented immigrants, regardless of age, will qualify for Medi-Cal, California's version of the federal Medicaid program for people with low incomes,” ABC News reported at the time. “Previously, undocumented immigrants were not qualified to receive comprehensive health insurance but were allowed to receive emergency and pregnancy-related services under Medi-Cal as long as they met eligibility requirements, including income limits and California residency in 2014.”

California isn’t alone in handing out taxpayer-funded health benefits to illegal immigrants. According to Newsweek, a total of 14 states have programs that provided some form of health coverage to illegals: California, New York, Illinois, Washington, New Jersey, Oregon, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Rhode Island, Maine, and Vermont. Even Washington, D.C., is on the list. In other words, it’s not just one radical blue state; it’s a growing club of Democrat-run states (and Utah, for some reason) that had healthcare for illegals as official policy.

Apparently, according to that Newsweek link, New Hampshire is the only state in the Northeast to not offer health benefits to illegals.

Also of note:

  • Not one nickel to Wikipedia until … they enact at least some of the reforms advocated by Larry Sanger at the Free Press: I Founded Wikipedia. Here’s How to Fix It.

    I launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, alongside Jimmy Wales, then the CEO of dot-com company Bomis. It was designed as a freewheeling public successor to the peer-reviewed Nupedia, which we’d founded the year prior.

    For the next 14 months, my task was to transform a completely empty, blank wiki into what would soon become the largest written resource in the history of the world. I oversaw the establishment of several fundamental standards, including rules about neutrality and verifiability.

    I left Wikipedia in 2002. In the 23 years since, and in the last few years in particular, the standards that inspired the company have been sacrificed in favor of ideology. The following nine theses are my Hail Mary proposal to reform Wikipedia. I do this, as Martin Luther said when he posted his famous 95 theses, “out of love for the truth and the desire to elucidate it.”

    Sanger's proposals sound reasonable to me. Fight the power, Larry!

  • Other than that, though, it's fine. I swear this guy Jeff Maurer seems to get more reasonable every week. His latest: My Pet Peeve With Populism Is That It’s a Hateful Lie.

    The New York Times is running a series in which “thinkers, upstarts and ideologues” offer ideas for the future of the Democratic Party. The first installment has a hell of a title: “Democrats Are in Crisis. Eat-the-Rich Populism Is the Only Answer.” That’s right: The only answer. Not “part of the answer” or “one possible answer” — the article doesn’t allow that Democrats might nibble on the rich and see how that goes, or eat the rich with a side of cultural moderation. The author argues that Democrats must divour, digest, and — one assumes — shit out the rich in order to win.

    In support of this thesis, the author — historian Timothy Shenk — repeatedly points to one example: Dan Osborn. Osborn ran for Senate in Nebraska as an independent and lost by seven points, which is a good showing in a state that Harris lost by 20 (excuses for which can be found in Harris’ book: Not My Fault: How Everyone but Me Is to Blame for America Not Recognizing My Amazing Leadership Qualities). Osborn has a populist streak, which Shenk argues is responsible for his good showing. But populism wasn’t the only thing that made Osborn unique: He was also culturally conservative (pro “build the wall” and pro-gun) and was conspicuously not a Democrat. That’s huge in a part of the country where the Democratic brand is in Theranos/Enron/Triangle Shirtwaist Company territory. Osborn’s name is also “Osborn”, and I think that some people might have thought that he’s related to legendary Cornhuskers football coach Tom Osborne (he’s not). You may think I’m being silly by thinking that some voters would fixate on a name, but if there was a Senate candidate named Timmy Hitler — no relation! — I doubt that many people would argue that names don’t matter.

    So, how do we know that Osborn’s economic populism was the secret to his…well not success, but: secret to his itty-bitty ass kicking? We don’t. And the other populists Shenk name checks are similarly lame examples. Zohran Mamdani won a Democratic primary in one of the bluest parts of the country against an alleged pervert/confirmed mediocrity; to me, that doesn’t scream “first wave in a sea change”. Similarly, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Murphy have only shown that left-wing populists can win in places where a pile of thumbtacks with a “D” on it could win. Shenk is so desperate for evidence supporting his theory that he points to the populist rhetoric of a recently-declared Iowa Senate candidate — that guy hasn’t even won anything yet! Only in social science would someone have the balls to say “Having found no solid evidence for my thesis, I point to evidence that will materialize next year and prove me right!”

    The Iowa Senate candidate is Nathan Sage, who says he wants "to tear the Democratic Party down and build it back up from the studs." A decent idea, except for the building it back up part.