The Washington Post warned Democrats that they’ve walked into President Donald Trump’s “shutdown trap” in a Wednesday morning editorial.
Under the headline, “Democrats just marched into a shutdown trap,” the Post assailed progressives for forcing Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to abandon off ramps that might have prevented a government shutdown.
” In doing so, progressives embraced the same disastrous mentality that led the House Freedom Caucus to believe it could come out ahead in previous government funding standoffs: They wrongly assumed their political leverage would withstand the ensuing fallout,” argued the Post, which continued:
Left-wing Democrats, like the Freedom Caucus before them, enter this shutdown in a position of weakness. President Donald Trump and his budget director, Russell Vought, now have extraordinary authority to choose which agencies to close, what spending to prioritize and even which government workers to lay off. As Trump warned on Tuesday, “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible.”
Expect him to follow through in a way that maximizes pain for Democrats, who will probably face pressure from their allies in government labor unions after employees are fired and others are forced to work without pay. While congressional Democrats have so far put up a mostly unified front, coalescing around a demand to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire at the end of the year, there’s no guarantee the party’s resolve will last.
“Even if Republicans decide to eventually come to the table for a compromise on health care this time around, the details could splinter the left, especially if they include conservative priorities,” added the historically left-leaning editorial board, which concluded that “The Freedom Caucus’s tactics have failed to achieve Republicans’ goals every time. There is no reason to think this shutdown will end any differently for its left-wing counterpart.”
The federal shutdown — the result of a dispute over the impending expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies — began at midnight on Wednesday.
The post ‘Disastrous’: The Washington Post Warns Democrats They’ve Walked Into Trump’s ‘Trap’ first appeared on Mediaite.
