The government is closed,

AND REPUBLICANS ARE TO BLAME

It’s the 5th of October, 2025, and I’m crashing out because the government is shut down and the Republicans still don’t want to negotiate. I should preface this by saying that, yes, it is the fault of the Republicans that the government is shut down – they hold a majority in the House, the Senate, and (of course) the Presidency. In political junkie parlance, this gives them a “trifecta.” In normal person parlance, this gives them the “responsibility to get their fucking act together and keep the goddamn government open.” OK, so they have a trifecta. Why, then, is the government shut down? Put simply, the government shuts down when Congress can’t agree on a funding bill to keep it open. Now, the Republicans do have control of Congress, but in order to pass a funding bill, one actually needs 60 votes in the Senate (rather a simple majority of 51), because of a process called the filibuster. Because the Republicans only have 53 seats in the Senate at this point, they would need to convince 7 Democratic Senators to vote for any funding bill they want passed. Herein lies the crux of the problem. Democrats will not, and should not, lend their votes to a funding bill that does not reflect their policy priorities. As such, Republicans must craft a funding bill that will reflect at least some of those priorities, and they must get Democrats to agree to pass it. In short, they must negotiate to keep the government open.

No such thing ended up happening, though. The leader of Republicans in the House, Mike Johnson, is quoted as saying “there is nothing to negotiate.” Apart from being a blatant lie, this does quite a bit to betray the intentions of the Republicans these days. They don’t feel that they should have to negotiate. They want to rule alone, without actually having the votes to do so.

So what do the Democrats even want here? According to Dem. leadership in Congress, there are two things that a funding bill would need to get Dem. votes. First, Democrats want the insurance premium tax credits provided by the ACA to be extended, as these credits will lapse on Dec. 31 2025 otherwise. According to polling, this is an overwhelmingly popular proposal, with 75% of Americans and 59% of Republicans in favor. Indeed, if these tax credits are not extended, tens of millions of Americans (starting with basically all of the 24 million on an insurance plan bought through an ACA marketplace) would see their insurance premiums go up. Some projections say that costs could double. The second Dem. priority has to do with impoundments – where the President refuses to spend money appropriated by Congress. In short, the Democrats want to curtail Mr. Trump’s ability to do this, primarily because the idea that the President can just decide not to spend money appropriated by an act of Congress is blatant fucking lawlessness. The President, no matter his personal feelings about the laws passed by Congress, must faithfully execute them.

That’s enough foreplay. Now to the crashout. My first question to Republicans: what the fuck? Why is it that after DECADES of obstructionism, after countless negotiations with Democrats (who have ALWAYS negotiated with you), you now decide that it must be Democrats (the minority party) who must give up all their policy priorities, put “country over party” (whatever that means in the age of Trump), and agree to your fiscal policies that would be better suited in a fucking Harry Potter novel than in this country? Indeed, Republicans understand that they are on the losing side of the healthcare issue. They understand that their policies will cause prices to go up for millions of Americans, and that as a result, said policies are unpopular. They understand that their moronic approach to governing this country is only losing them support. Instead of facing those facts, however, the GOP has restored to its tried-and-true PR strategy: brazenly lying to the American people. Right now, out of every GOP propaganda outlet you can think of, the noxious lie that the Democrats want “illegals” to get free healthcare is being spread as if it were a Nobel Prize-winning discovery. To be perfectly clear, illegal immigrants are INELIGIBLE for federal health care coverage of any sort, including the kind provided by these tax credits. Once again: “illegals” CANNOT RECEIVE ACA TAX CREDITS. This, of course, is despite the fact that these immigrants pay the same payroll taxes as every other working American, meaning that they actually contribute more to the federal healthcare budget than they take out (which is nearly zero – they only receive care in emergency circumstances, because we aren’t a country of fucking savages that denies people emergency care based on where they were born).

Another question that jumps out at me is this: who the fuck asked for this? Seriously, who wants a governing party that is so enveloped by their ideology that they can’t even do so much as negotiate with the minority party as the government is shutting down? Who wants a president who posts videos of his opponents that are the very definition of the strawman fallacy instead of working to keep the government open? Who wants a governing party that actually wants to INCREASE healthcare costs for millions of Americans, while lying about it? Who wants a country where the priorities of the people and the priorities of the government are so divorced from each other that it seems as though they might have never even been one and the same? Who wants random tariffs and unlawful kidnappings and tax cuts for the most well-off while Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities, like housing, healthcare, and groceries? Where is this great majority of Americans that voted for a government to stupid, feckless, and crazy that they can’t even keep the lights on?

Trump and his inner circle interpreted their slim victory in 2024 as a mandate to govern without the consent of the governed. As such, we have seen a cabal of sycophantic ideological hacks come to power, executing their will without any regard for the meaning of the words “we the people.” They have embarked on some grand crusade to turn America into a white, christian nation of morons, isolated from the world and even reality itself. None of their policy proposals make any sense interpreted any other way, nor do their PR efforts make any sense unless you take them as frantic cover for this bizarro platform. This circus, though, cannot last forever. Eventually, things come to a head and the most incompetent dumbasses ever let loose on this country (to paraphrase Tony Blair) collide with the screen door called gridlock. In the past week, that collision has occurred, and the majority party is tasked with negotiating to keep the government open. To cooks like Trump, Vance, Johnson, and Thune, however, there is no negotiating to be done. They don’t know how to do it, because unlike the rest of us, it has never occurred to them that they might be wrong. It’s always been their way or the highway, and they’ve just missed the last exit.