Democrats have only hardened their position as the government shutdown enters its 23rd day, leaving Republican majorities in Congress with few answers — and many criticisms.
For the 12th time, Senate Democrats blocked the Republican Party’s government funding legislation this week without a single senator switching his or her vote.
Just three Democratic caucus members voted for the bill: John Fetterman, D-Pa.; Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.; and Angus King, I-Maine. That means Republicans are still five votes short of the 60-vote threshold to ensure passage of the bill, just as they have been since before the government shut down 23 days ago.
Democratic voters had pressured their party to take a more confrontational posture toward Trump in the shutdown battle. The new stance may be paying off with the party’s base.
There should be no reason to worry that they know if anyone is organizing, because it should be a plan that requires only numbers and expects only political change.
Where we need leadership and planning however is in getting ahead of the sabotage and dissonance that will plague such operations with or without the enemy knowing about them, the provocateurs, the bad-faith actors, and of course the expected problems we always face on the left, which is a vastly splintered and wildly diverse mess of groups, each fiercely principled and educated and ready to stand their ground and argue and debate superficial or distracting issues until nobody wants anything to do with any of it anymore.
We need populism, we need liberals, we need actual political leaders involved from the ground up. This is why we need to start right now by building communities. Pushing each other to be more social, to get to know the politics of where you live, who is running for what, what their views are, who they actually represent. If we made a more unified effort across the whole country to start pushing pride in our communities and our representatives, we could take it all back in just a few cycles, it IS doable, it’s happened in the past, it can happen again but we have to do hard things. Harder than just showing up with protest signs, but that’s a good start.
I like to remind people that Mussolini was not captured by a band of plucky rebels who managed to push people out into the streets. Mussolini was deposed and arrested by his own government and the king, then he handed to the people to do as they wanted. Sometimes we need support in high places, and all this starts with picking wise leadership unless you want to do it yourself.