Shutdown: Republicans Calling on Democrats to Embrace Compromise… -The iPINIONS Journal

Is like Klansmen calling on blacks to embrace diversity.

No doubt you’ve heard President Trump leading Republicans in calling on Democrats to compromise to end this government shutdown.

They would have you believe they’re compromising by insisting on $5.7 billion in funding for a wall as part of broader border security. For Democrats, though, this amounts to little more than Republicans insisting it’s their wall or this shutdown.

Trump rejected the idea of reopening the government while continuing negotiations with Congress.

The [Democratic-controlled] House has voted on bills to reopen more shuttered government departments, but that legislation has already been declared dead-on-arrival in the [Republican-controlled] Senate because of a veto threat from Trump.

(The New York Times, January 15, 2019)

In fact, Democrats have offered myriad compromises to reopen the government. What’s more, the bills they passed include $1.3 billion in funding for border fencing – the term Trump says they should feel free to use when referring to his wall. Not to mention this clarifying but damning fact:

Over the last two years, [the Republican-controlled] Congress has provided nearly $1.7 billion to build or replace fencing on the southern border, but the Administration has hardly spent any of that money, and the projects it has undertaken have ballooned in cost. So far, only six percent of those funds have been spent. Six.

(The Washington Post, January 3, 2019)

More to the point, though, someone should ask these Republican grand compromisers when utterly rejecting compromise stopped being an article of their political faith. After all, here – from “The Will of the American People? Really?” July 11, 2012 – is what they were saying about it not so long ago:

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No less a person than Speaker John Boehner betrayed their new jihadist approach to politics just weeks after Republicans won control of the House in November 2010.

He did so during the December 12, 2010, edition of 60 Minutes, when Leslie Stahl stated that ‘surely governing means compromising,’ and then asked why he was so unwilling to say that he and the Republicans would be willing to compromise with Obama and the Democrats. Boehner replied:

We are doing the will of the American people. As for compromise, I utterly reject the word.

This, in a nutshell, explains why we’ve been treated over the past two years to the spectacle of Washington gridlock over every piece of legislation, including those merely extending policies Republicans once supported.

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Of course, that also explains why we’re suffering through this longest government shutdown in US history – at 27 days and counting. But it’s debatable which is worse in this case: the brazen hypocrisy of congressional Republicans or the craven support they’re showing for Trump’s (latest) dictatorial tantrum.

Either way, this is just another manifestation of what I decried in “Tribalism and Dysfunction in American Politics,” June 24, 2018

Meanwhile, nothing exposes what a fraud Trump’s Art of the Deal is quite like him already negotiating his administration into three government shutdowns. Frankly, one can fairly decry his leadership as an unprecedented spree of incompetence and blame-shifting projections.

I did just that with respect to this mess in “Trump’s First Year Ends with Government Shutdown,” January 20, 2018, and “Trump’s Second Year Ends with Government Shutdown,” December 24, 2018; and, with respect to his pathological habit of projecting all his faults and misdeeds onto others, in “Forget the Clinton Foundation. Shut Down the Trump Organization!” August 26, 2016.