The Hill Says How Dems And GOP Can Save Face And End Shutdown

Again, my way would be to add the Obamacare subsidies in with a 1 year expiration date, explaining that this won’t happen again, there needs to be a serious change to the program (there’s no way it can be killed off at this point, sadly).

How Democrats, GOP could end shutdown and save face

Voices in both parties say Democrats and Republicans alike are looking for a deal that would allow them to save face while ending a shutdown that’s causing increasing pain to Americans across the country.

The difficulty is finding a sweet spot that reopens the government and allows both sides to walk away telling their bases — with a straight face — that they won.

There is no obvious solution, and it’s anyone’s guess what the exact compromise will look like. But lawmakers, strategists and other political experts say there are two ingredients crucial to a deal: President Trump and ObamaCare subsidies.

The enhanced tax credits under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have been the central sticking point throughout the month-long shutdown, and both parties have staked out public positions that have, so far, been immovable.

Thing is, Democrats want a lot more, like resumption of USAID and all sorts of Crazy

Republicans say they won’t negotiate an extension of the expiring subsidies — the key Democratic demand — before the Democrats help reopen the government. Democrats say they won’t help reopen the government until the Republicans negotiate on health care. Neither side has given an inch in the month since the government shut its doors — and leaders of both sides publicly insist that they won’t.

The way out of the impasse will require a delicate dance, but experts say they have at least a couple options to pursue without either side appearing to cave.

The first involves a commitment from Trump, who’s been on the sidelines of the debate, to sit down with a select group of Democrats on a specific date to negotiate a deal to extend the ACA subsidies in some form. In return, Democrats would agree to open up the government by supporting the “clean” Republican spending bill that’s been wallowing in the Senate for more than four weeks.

The same CR Dems voted for 13 times prior to the shutdown.

A second option to break the impasse would involve Republicans promising an up or down vote — not just negotiations — on extending the ACA subsidies in return for Democrats’ help in ending the shutdown. (snip)

If Republicans renege, Democrats could shutter the government again at the next budget deadline, whenever it arrives.

Dems won’t buy this, because Dems renege all the time on promises, and would only see what they would do.

Besides ACA subsidies, Democrats have also demanded that there be specific language in a budget bill that requires Trump to spend funds as Congress intended to. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said even if Democrats support a short term stopgap measure to reopen the government, he doesn’t believe his fellow colleagues will sign onto a full year budget unless it “constrains the level of illegality happening.”

“I’m not going to vote for an immoral, corrupt budget, whether it be a short term budget or a long term budget, that throws millions of people off their health care and helps Trump engage in his ongoing witch hunt operation of my allies. I’m just not going to do it. And again, I think that the bar is different for a short term deal…the longer term budget will be the opportunity for us to put more constraints on his illegality. But I’m interested in far more than a promise or a failed vote,” Murphy said.

Y’all voted for it again and again and again. What’s changed?

But with the shutdown poised to hit millions of low-income people in federal education, nutrition and health care programs — and with flight delays already snarling air travel coast to coast and threatening to get worse — some observers say both sides will have little choice but to move toward the other.

Here’s what interested me the most in this piece: do Americans realize that the federal government is way, way, way, way, way too involved in citizen’s lives, that they provide way, etc. too much aid? That it would make a hell of a lot more sense if it was state governments funding and appropriating? That we should be sending less money to Los Federales, instead sending it to the state? That that is the way it is supposed to be, and that the feds have really no Constitutional authority for most of what they do.

Perhaps it is not such a good to have the federal government so involved?