It’s not often that I criticize the WashPost for, well, kissing Donald Trump’s ass, but today is “not often”. The Post has an editorial up, “Come on, lawmakers. Not another shutdown.” Yo, Post! Don’t you mean “Come on, Donald Trump. Not another shutdown.”
It was Donald Trump who imposed the most recent shutdown, as a way of forcing Democrats in Congress to give him something they didn’t want to give him. That’s not way our government is supposed to work. Newt Gingrich invented the modern shutdown as an end run around the presidential veto. Now Trump is using it to give himself dictatorial powers, to force Congress to pass whatever legislation he wishes. “Lawmakers” are in fact lawmakers, not stenographers. There’s a difference.
Afterwords
My apologies to anyone (and I’m sure there are many) who don’t know what a stenographer is. Several centuries ago, man had not learned to type. Women, called stenographers, were paid to write down whatever an important man said, in “short hand”, which would then be typed up for posterity.
