Democrats pretty excited they have the votes to shut down the government

Remember when Democrats treated a government shutdown as the end of days? National parks would close! Rotten meat would be served because there weren't any inspectors! They would even put up barricades in front of very high-profile institutions of the federal government to make their melodramatic point: The federal government you want . . . you need . . . has been shut down and it's all the fault of Republicans!

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Good times, good times. It seems like things have changed dramatically, but they really haven't. The Democrats have never actually been horrified at the thought of a government shutdown, because it's the perfect opportunity to blame Republicans no matter who is actually running things. If a Democrat is in the White House, then those mean Republicans are trying to keep him from governing. If a Republican is in the White House, well, he doesn't know how to govern! Even though the only reason there may be a government shutdown is that Democrats are filibustering a perfectly reasonable spending bill over objections to serious border enforcement. It really doesn't matter how they do it or why they do it. If Democrats cause a shutdown - however much of a joke this "shutdown" actually is - they know the media will blame Republicans and sell the narrative that Republicans either can't govern or don't want to. Which is why Democrats today are so triumphant the event at which they used to feign horror seems to be within their grasp:

McConnell lit into Democrats on Thursday evening for taking a hard line on linking the expiring Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to the government funding fight. He said the House's bill reauthorizing a children's health insurance program and keeping the government's lights on should be an "easy yes vote for any senator." "My Democratic colleagues' demand on illegal immigration at the behest of their far-left base have crowded out all other important business," McConnell said. "I think the American people clearly would not expect us to act this way." Schumer shot back: "The leader is looking to deflect blame. But it just won't work. We all know what the problem is. It's complete disarray on the Republican side." The two party leaders spent much of Thursday evening bickering on the Senate floor.

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Federal funding runs out at midnight Friday. If there is no spending plan in place by then, the federal government will begin to shut down non-essential operations — a crisis that both parties and the White House say the desperately want to avoid. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called on Senate Democrats to drop their opposition to the funding proposal, which would keep federal agencies open through Feb. 16. House Republicans also added tens of billions of dollars of funding for a popular children's health program in a bid to win more support. “Sen. Schumer, do not shut down the federal government," Ryan told reporters after the House vote. “It is risky, it is reckless and it is wrong.” Ryan added: “The only people standing in the way of keeping the government open are Senate Democrats. Whether there is a government shutdown or not is entirely up to them.”

I'll say again what I've said many times. Part of this is the fault a bipartisan acceptance of the complete abandonment of real federal budgets, which has been the norm since 2010, when Democrats controlled everything and decided there was no reason to pass real budgets, lest there be a document that would show the American people just how much they blown up spending upon assuming complete control of Washington in 2009.

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A continuing resolution is not a budget, and almost everyone in Congress is complicit in this continued charade

You would have thought that once Republicans took over, they would return to real normal-order budgets. They have not. Washington has gotten used to the idea that you just pass a continuing resolution every few months, and while you go through the motions of drafting budgets every year (and the White House is required by law to do so), you don't really take seriously the idea of passing it. If the public expected the body politic to pass real budgets, and refused to accept their failure to do so, this would not keep happening. But when Democrats abandoned that responsibility nearly a decade ago, the media treated it like a nonstory and the public did not understand just how egregious and irrresponsible their actions - or in this case lack of action - had been. A continuing resolution is not a budget, and almost everyone in Congress is complicit in this continued charade. Having said that, it's clearly the Democrats who want this shutdown and are angling to make it happen. They're convinced that the media are so much in the tank for them that it will be impossible for Trump and the Republicans to hang around their necks the fact that they're only doing this in order to defend unfettered illegal immigration. And if the shutdown does indeed happen, then watch over the next several days as the narrative quickly turns to "Republicans in too much disarray to govern." If you believe that narrative, it's probably because you want to. But there's no misunderstanding the facts of who really wants this shutdown to happen, and is making sure it does.

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