RIGHT SPEAK: Nuking the Filibuster Would Come Back to Haunt Republicans; Democrats Betting That Americans Won’t Wise Up to their Shutdown Games

Nuking the filibuster would come back to haunt Republicans:

There are no saviors or happy endings in politics — just a grueling, soul-sucking, forever-war of attrition.

Everyone in power seems to forget this detail.

That includes President Donald Trump, who has again decided to exert pressure on Republicans to overturn the legislative filibuster and end the Democrat-generated government shutdown.

“Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

“We have to get the country open. And the way we’re going to do it this afternoon is to terminate the filibuster,” the president reportedly told Republican senators at a breakfast this week.

Nuking the filibuster is unprincipled, but it also makes little political sense: Trump would be doing Democrats a huge favor by greasing the wheels for exploiting fleeting one-party national majorities in the future, which will allow them to shove through massive generational “reforms” without any national consensus.

And they would be able to do it without taking any political heat for nuking the filibuster.

In recent years, they’ve coalesced around an argument that says the 60-vote threshold to cut off debate in the Senate is antiquated — a “Jim Crow relic,” said one-time filibuster champion former President Barack Obama — and fundamentally “undemocratic.”

Democrats contend that the filibuster facilitates “minority rule,” by which they mean “federalism.”

Yes, filibusters protect the minority because crass majoritarianism is objectively un-American, as is centralized one-party “democratic” rule from Washington.

The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution, but in many ways it is one of the last tools left in DC that can limit the power of the federal government and compel separation of powers. --->READ MORE HERE

REUTERS

Democrats betting that Americans won’t wise up to their shutdown games:

Apparently, Dems are willing to let the suffering continue as long as they can dodge responsibility; Republicans, meanwhile, feel they can't OK the $1.5 trillion ransom that Democrats demand. REUTERS

Believing they’re “winning” the government shutdown, Democrats are playing a dangerous game of chicken, aiming to keep on exploiting the public’s misdirected ire — without it being turned on them.

Yet what’s already a record-long federal closure could blow up in their faces if their scheming means millions of Americans can’t see grandma at Thanksgiving.

Even though it’s the Dems refusing to let the government reopen, Senate and House Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries & Co. bet that voters would finger Republicans for gumming up the works.

The gamble seemingly paid off Tuesday, as Democrats outperformed expectations in Virginia and New Jersey; at least some polls also show the public blaming the GOP more.

Most Americans don’t look past who’s in charge of the House, Senate and White House to grasp how the filibuster lets the minority party block the bill to fund federal operations, and of course much of the media is happy to frame Republicans as villains who don’t care if SNAP recipients can’t eat or furloughed federal workers can’t pay their bills.

Apparently, Dems are willing to let the suffering continue as long as they can dodge responsibility; Republicans, meanwhile, feel they can’t OK the $1.5 trillion ransom that Democrats demand.

So Axios and others report that the leftmost congressfolk who demanded the shutdown in the first place to appease the party’s base are now encouraging their colleagues to keep voting down Republican efforts to open the government back up.