The New Republic: The Case for the Forever Shutdown

Every time Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York—the Democrat with the most power in a shutdown because his withholding of seven senators toward a procedural vote keeps Republicans from proceeding—says that Democrats are looking to open the government through a negotiation around and deal on Affordable Care Act subsidies, he is acquiescing to the idea that a government in which Border Patrol agents paid with our tax dollars can shoot real bullets at protesters in Chicago after screaming “Do something, bitch!” can and should be deemed legitimate.

The truth is that Democrats can pay a million consultants to come up with a million different talking points on health care subsidies. They can keep holding press conferences in the Senate studio like every other press conference before it, talking to the same reporters, pretending like we live in a redeemable timeline where if they just keep on acting like it’s 2007, we might fall through a time portal that makes it so. But we live here in a country with a co-opted executive branch led by racist, xenophobic idiots who do not believe in law, empowered by a slavishly devoted Supreme Court that has decided shoveling unlimited power to said executive is more important than the law it disregards, and where the president thinks he can send national guardsmen from red states to blue states just because people of color live here and Fox News hosts hate that.

Who is served by pretending we live in an America different from this one? It’s certainly not the people being attacked in the streets in Chicago’s Logan Square, Humboldt Park, South Shore, Brighton Park, and Little Village, among many other diverse neighborhoods.