Partisanship in the time of Trump

It's hard. It's so hard.

As of Wednesday, amid internal GOP divisions on a spending bill and a potential shutdown looming Friday night, House Republicans had coalesced around a strategy: accuse Democrats planning to vote no because the plan doesn’t include relief for 700,000 young immigrants of deliberately blocking the renewal of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

[...]

Republicans thought that attaching a six-year reauthorization of CHIP to the short term continuing resolution was a win-win. Democrats who had railed for months that the GOP-controlled Congress had failed to fund the program would have a tough time voting against it despite their opposition to other aspects of the package. And if it went down in flames, Republicans could cast the blame on Congress’ minority party.

[...]

On Thursday morning, President Trump torched that strategy with a single tweet, indicating that CHIP should not be attached to the short-term spending bill at all.

  TPM

I wonder where he heard that.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) openly admitted Wednesday that he has no idea what President Trump wants or would sign when it comes to immigration. Each day, more Senate Republicans declare their intent to vote against the continuing resolution.

“It’s a mess,” Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) told reporters, exiting a closed-door lunch with the GOP caucus on Wednesday.

And yet, I'm not feeling any sympathy.

Even without the President swooping in to undermine this line of attack, there are a few problems with it. Republicans control both chambers of Congress, and could have passed a CHIP reauthorization at any time last year. Only after the program expired in September, putting millions of families who depend on it in limbo, did the House pass a CHIP bill that angered Democrats by making deep cuts to Obamacare’s Public Health and Prevention Fund. The GOP-controlled Senate never held a vote on CHIP at all.

Then, once new data showed that CHIP did not require any offsets at all and in fact saved the government money—Republicans still did not attempt to pass the program on its own. Instead, they chose to attach it to the spending bill—paired with other policies delaying some of Obamacare’s taxes—in order to make it difficult for Democrats to vote against a package that fails to meet many of their other priorities.

Try again. The key may lie in knowing exactly when The Most Notable Loser wakes up and turns on Fox, and be sure to get somebody on air to tell him just what you want.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.


UPUPDATE:

Aaaaand, there it is: the requisite Trump correction.