I'm not claiming the Democrats had full control of anything. And no, a shut down would not have been much faster. It would have been more chaotic, but not faster. And maybe the chaos would have helped get more people into the streets resisting. I don't know.
But I do know that capitulating to fascists is never a good strategy. There has never once been a situation where capitulating to fascists has resulted in a better outcome. Schumer got played. You got played.
Right, it was lose/lose. Either way bad things are going to happen. So why sign on to participate and take ownership of it? What does anyone gain by that.
The situation would not be worse under a shutdown. It would just be a different type of bad. Trump and Musk are still firing anyone they want without regard to the law or courts. They're still gutting funding wherever they want.
The ONLY difference between passing this CR and not is that the Vichy Democrats put their stamp of approval on what's happening now.
I need you to explain why you think it’s a better choice to give Trump the ability to indiscriminately terminate non-essential government employees than to have control of the budget.
Who do you think has control of the budget? Do you really think that by rolling over and giving Trump everything he wants now Schumer will somehow have control of anything in September?
And why do you think passing the CR will stop Trump and Musk from terminating anyone they want? They're still doing that.
ALL spending bills are "temporary" in that they don't provide unlimited funds for forever. The CR doesn't say, "give as much money as is needed until September." It says "we allocated $XXXX". And since we know how to predict how much money the government spends, we know that amount of money will run out in September.
This is the same way it works if they passed an appropriations bill. The only difference is that they based spending levels on the previous spending bills rather than on a budget bill.
You have no clue what you're talking about, which is demonstrated by your repeated use of the term "budget reconciliation bill" as if it applies to anything here. The budget reconciliation process can only happen after an appropriation bill is passed, which this CR was.
So you are admitting that passing the CR did nothing to protect these jobs you seem so concerned for? Then why are you arguing so fervently in favor of Vichy collaborationists?
Why are you pretending like they're not doing that anyways? There are people right now lined up outside NIH and HHS buildings because DOGE has shut them out and is firing them. The last of the USAID workers lost their jobs yesterday. Yet you're here pretending like allowing the CR to pass prevented people from losing their jobs? Brother, you've been duped into being a collaborationist!
Yes. Let them take the shutdown and own it. You seem to be operating from the premise that a shutdown would have been popular and had no negative political blowback on the fascists. History does not support this assumption.
Make Trump and Musk go tell people that they don't deserve the services they'd lose from a shutdown. Instead, Schumer said that Democrats agree with all the cuts that were already in the CR.
If you can't extract concessions, then you let them take the loss alone. Instead, Vichy Schumer just agreed to sign the Democrats on as collaborators.
You don’t understand what a CR is if you think it’s permanent. A continuing resolution is stopgap funding when a budget reconciliation fails to be passed.
You don't understand how Congress works. A CR isn't used when Budget Reconciliation isn't passed. It's used when spending bills don't pass.
The "normal' (or what's supposed to be normal) process for funding the government is that the Congress passes a Budget, which is a set of funding guidelines, but doesn't actually allocate money. That budget is then used by various committees to write appropriations bills, which is what actually allows the government to spend money. Those spending bills are typically supposed to only cover 1 year, with new appropriations given every year.
Except Congress has been a dysfunctional mess for decades. They rarely actually pass Budget or appropriations bills. That's why we're always under these shutdown threats, because Congress doesn't work as it's supposed to. So when they come down to crunch time and can't pass spending bills, they pass a Continuing Resolution (CR). A CR is an appropriations bill, but instead of using a recent budget as a guideline, the CR just says "continue funding the government at the exact levels it was with these minor adjustments" (usually cutting funding by 2-5% and/or increasing in specific areas, like disaster relief if there was just a hurricane or something).
A CR, just like a normal appropriations bill, funds only to a set level. They don't have a time limit in that they say "funding will stop on X date", but they know how fast the government spends money, so they can predict that $XXX will last YYY days. In that way, they can say "fund $XXX worth" knowing that will expire on a certain date. CRs are just as "permanent" as any appropriations bill
A Budget Reconciliation is a completely different thing. It's a process that allows the Senate to adjust existing spending bills while bypassing the 60 vote threshold for cloture required by the filibuster rules. When the Congress writes a spending bill, they include language within it to say, "this portion of the budget can later be adjusted through reconciliation". The intention is to strip out particularly contentious parts of the larger bill to allow the larger bill to pass while letting Congress then address the stickier issue on its own. So, for example, you don't have to hold up funding national parks just because you can't decide how much to spend on a new military drone program, for example.
However, since Reconciliation allows the majority party to bypass the filibuster, it's use is primarily to pass legislation that the majority knows they can't do through normal legislation (due to the 60 vote threshold the filibuster puts on everything). There are certain rules which I can get into if you want that limit what types of things can be done through reconciliation and how often. But your framing in your comment above about how CRs are supposedly temporary until a Reconciliation Bill is passed is just flat out wrong.
Great example! These little turns of phrases and wordplay that reveal the incredible right-wing bias of our media are all over the place if you learn how to look for them.
Another great example you see all the time is "office involved shooting" whenever someone is shot by police. It's always something like "John Smith died after an officer involved shooting" or "a gun was discharged in an officer involved shooting that resulted in the death of Jane Smith." Where it should be "Officer Joe Blow murdered John and Jane Smith."
By rubber stamping, in this specific instance, I mean Schumer allowing the CR to pass without extracting any concessions. When the most powerful Democrat in the country, and the only one with power to prevent the CR from passing, just lets it happen, it sends the message that this is business as normal and nothing people need to be overly concerned with.
I agree that a shutdown would have also been bad. But it also would have send the message that Democrats aren't going to be collaborationists. It would have said, "this is a shit sandwich, but it's yours and I want no part of it." Instead, Schumer took a big bite out of that shit sandwich and said, "Democrats and Republicans are in this together."
You said it was a lose/lose? Sure, no argument on that. But let them take the political loss rather than giving the fascists cover, FFS.
This is where we are now with the filibuster. Pretty much every single bill that doesn't enjoy broad bipartisan support gets a silent filibuster as a matter of course. This means that basically all legislation coming out of the Senate requires 60 votes to pass. That means that the minority gets to set the agenda since it's easier to come up with 41 votes against something than 60 votes for something. This contributes to and feeds off of the hyper polarization in our politics. A minority party knows that if they can just keep all their members in line, they can easily block pretty much anything the majority wants to do unless it gets enough national attention that blocking it would garner negative press on the minority party. But even that is heavily mitigated by the existence of stuff like Fox News and media echochambers (of which, the Right is WAY better at creating and controlling).
It's also important to recognize that the silent filibuster is a big part of how we got to the point in our politics where Congress is so incredibly dysfunctional that Trump can actually just ignore and bypass Congress as much as he wants. All the shit he's done since taking office this time has been done without Congress. In a previous era, that might have drawn a lot more criticism, even from his own party. But the existence of the silent filibuster and 60 vote threshold to pass legislation has created the conditions where we're all used to Congress not doing anything at all. People want action, and they're used to Congress not being able to do anything, so Trump doing it through Executive Order seems like a relief to them. And the same thing, although to a much less authoritarian degree, happened under Biden, Obama, and W Bush, too. Remember Biden trying to cancel student loans through EO? Remember Obama creating DACA by EO or telling the DEA to not enforce cannabis prohibition in states where cannabis is legal? That's all stuff Congress is supposed to be doing but can't because of the silent filibuster and 60 vote threshold.
Since the late 90s, any speaking filibuster in the Senate, like we're seeing Booker do now, is purely political theater. It's done to attract national attention and news coverage, not to actually block or prevent legislation. Which is fine, so long as we all understand the purpose. Political theater is important to actually getting stuff done sometimes because it can drive mass action or sentiment.
My overall point here, though, is that everything about this history of the filibuster and how it works today was the result of short-term thinking to solve an immediate problem without consideration of the long-term consequences.
A little nitpick on how we got to the modern silent filibuster, because I think the history is important and demonstrates how creating rules that might seem well-intentioned at the time end up having disastrous effects when you don't think about the long-term impacts.
Literally everything about the evolution of the filibuster was the result of unintended consequences. When the Senate was first created, they included a rule which was common among legislatures in Colonial American and England called the "previous question" rule. There were no rules on how long debate could take place, but, at any time (including in the middle of a speaker's turn) anyone could call for the immediate consideration of the previous question. If that got a majority support (50%+1), debate was immediately stopped and the issue was put to an immediate vote. The word 'filibuster' didn't exist at the time, but this was very similar to our modern cloture motion, which is used to end filibusters, except the previous question only required a simple majority of those present, where was cloture requires 3/5 of all members (including those not present). The previous question was a lower bar to clear than cloture is.
However, in the early days of the Senate it was a very collegial institution. All the Senators, even those opposed to each other on policy, were all friendly with each other. As such, after the first 15ish years, they had never had the need to use the previous question rule. Whenever a Senator was taking too long during debate, someone would gently tell them to wrap it up and they would. They relied more on the collegial atmosphere and friendships than the actual rules. In 1805, then-VP Aaron Burr (of murdering Hamilton and trying to steal half of North America to turn himself into a monarch fame) wanted to reform Senate rules. Mostly, he was trying to eliminate unnecessary rules to streamline the Senate. One of the rules he got rid of was the previous question. The intention was just to get rid of a rule that had never been used, but this effectively meant that there was no longer any institutional way to end debate if a Senator decided to just keep talking.
This didn't have much of an impact for about a century. There were occasional filibusters here and there, but they were very limited and extremely rare. The top issue that got filibusters was anything related to slavery and (after the Civil War) civil rights. Senators from slave states (or former slave states), would filibuster any legislation they saw as a threat to slavery and white supremacy. In general, these filibusters ended because the Senators who introduced whatever piece of legislation would withdraw their legislation and offer to water it down in exchange for an end to the filibuster. In this way, over the 19th century the predominate use of the filibuster was to prevent or slow reforms that would weaken white supremacy.
As time went on, the use of the filibuster increased in frequency. The general way it would work was that a bill would be introduced. A group of Senators from the minority opposing it would organize to filibuster. Rather than just 1 person holding the floor, they'd swap out using a rule that allows the speaker to temporarily cede the floor for a question, but they'd get the floor back when the question ended. But their allied Senator who was ostensibly just asking a question would then spend hours asking that question, which gave the filibuster leader time to take a break. When they were ready to continue, the question would end and the floor would go back to the original speaker. In the meantime, the allies of the filibustering Senators would meet with the sponsors of the legislation to get them to water down their bill in whatever way that made it acceptable. Once that agreement was made, they'd end the filibuster and move on. It's important to note that the filibuster at this time was not seen as a tool to kill legislation, but rather to force a concession.
The culminated in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson was trying to get a law passed that would allow the Navy to arm merchant ships during WW1. A group of anti-war Senators filibustered and got this provision removed. This enraged Wilson and he insisted the Senate adopt a cloture rule which would allow 2/3 of the Senators present in the chamber to vote to immediately end debate and bring the issue to a vote (this would later be changed to 3/5 of all members, regardless if they were present in the chamber). The existence of this rule dramatically changed how the filibuster was used. Rather than being a tool to force a concession, it now became something that could actually kill legislation. The supporters now had to arrange to have a 2/3 majority in the chamber when the cloture vote was pulled in order to pass the legislation. This shifted power from the majority to the minority. The minority just had to ensure they controlled 1/3+1 of the chamber at any given time to prevent cloture. Rather than the impetus being on the minority to actually continue the filibuster and negotiate a concession, it was now on the majority to produce a super-majority. The intention was to create a rule that prevented Senate business from being ground to a halt, but the effect was just the opposite. It gave more power to the minority than the majority.
This directly led to an increase in the frequency of use of the filibuster. Over the next half-century the filibuster was primarily used to prevent any Civil Rights Legislation from reforming the Jim Crow South. Since there was now a real possibility that a filibuster could actually kill a bill, there was no longer any reason for the filibustering party to negotiate concessions with the majority. They just sat back and continued their filibusters until the majority either got sick of it and pulled the bill or managed to produce a super-majority (which has always been damn near impossible in the Senate, only 2 cloture votes were ever successful between 1917-1964). This culminated in 1964 with a filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which, when it eventually passed, effectively ended Jim Crow). A group of segregationist Senators from the South organized to filibuster for over 2 months. Whenever the Senate was in session over those 2 months, the segregationists held the floor and mostly spewed racists screeds about the evils of integration and other white supremacist nonsense. Eventually the pro-Civil Rights caucus managed to get a few people who were just sick of the unending filibuster and passed a cloture motion. However, this was a huge embarrassment for the Senate and they knew they needed to change the rules.
The problem, as they saw it, was that only a single issue was allowed before the Senate at a time. When a bill or nomination vote, etc was put forth, that issue had to be fully resolved before they could move onto the next thing. Either it had to get a vote up or down, or the sponsor had to pull it (meaning the issue was dead). During this time, no other Senate business can happen. No other issues can be debated or voted upon. Committees can't meet. Nothing else can happen. So when the segregationists filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 2 months, literally NO other Senate business was able to happen. This was an extremely high profile bill (it had originally be proposed, filibustered, and pulled the previous year while JFK was president, then reintroduce in 1964 after LBJ took office and was promoted as JFK's legacy), so it couldn't just be pulled to mollify the filibusterers. And this was an election year where 2/3 of the Senate was going back to their home state to ask for another term and had to justify the fact they sat on their asses doing nothing for 2 months while segregationists were allowed to spew white supremacy on the Senate floor.
So, just like Burr did when he eliminated the previous question rule, and just like Wilson did when he insisted on the cloture rule, Senate leadership created a rule aimed at solving the immediate problem without looking at what the long-term implications were. They created the multi-track legislative process we have today. Under this system, the Senate Majority Leader could take whatever issue was before the Senate now and "temporarily" table it so they could move on to another issue. Whereas previously an issue had to be either pulled or voted upon before the Senate could move on, now they could just leave it in limbo. The issue wasn't pulled, but it also wouldn't get a vote. The Majority Leader could then go back to it whenever they wanted. The idea was that if a filibuster started, they could switch tracks to something else. If/when they went back to that filibustered issue, the filibustering Senator would get the floor back and could continue, but if they couldn't come up with the votes for cloture (which were now expanded to 3/5 of the entire Senate, which made cloture even more difficult than it was before) they could just move on to something else without wasting the Senate's time.
Again, though, this shifted the entire dynamic of how the filibuster was actually used. The new rules went into place in 1972. The use of the filibuster (just like after cloture was first created in 1917) began to increase, and the speed of increase went up over time. At first, through the 80s and early 90s, a Senator would actually have to start their filibuster before the issue would be put on the back burner and the Senate move on to another issue. By the early 2000s, though, all a Senator had to do was tell the Majority leader they intended to filibuster if the issue came to the floor and the Majority leader would just automatically table it, never even allowing for debate.
So your argument is that it's actually the best decision to just rubber stamp everything the fascists do because trying to oppose it might end up worse? And that if we just rubber stamp everything now, they'll be nicer and not try to make an even worse budget/CR in September?
That's some Neville Chamberlain-level appeasement bullshit right there. "pea
Those of us who pay attention know.
However, the media ecosystem is INCREDIBLY conservative and pumps out the rah-rah jingoism whenever it can. Those of who just stick to the mainstream echochambers think the US is a bastion of freedom and peace.
This is a common myth that isn't really backed up by the historical or archeological record. Most pirate crews were not proto-anarchists looking to live a life of absolute liberty. They were more comparable to modern street gangs. The captains tended to be a strongman type leader who imposed their will over the crew through fear and coercion. The pirates themselves tended to be outcasts from society who couldn't turn to authorities to try to escape their situation for a variety of reasons, mostly because they were criminals who knew they'd be imprisoned or killed if they went to authorities.
Probably the only place where anything close to what you describe ever really existed was small communities in Madagascar which became the inspiration for the probably mythical Libertatia. The communities that definitely did exist weren't some ideological project to try to craft a society absent hierarchical power structures. They were just small, impoverished communities of families where the patriarchs (the pirates) spent most of their time away (at sea doing pirating) so the communities largely ran themselves without a power structure. This isn't because they had an ideological opposition to them, but because the authority was the pirate leader who spent 3/4 of their time away (and, therefore, couldn't do the job of being in charge) and when they were home they spent their time partying.
No, the idea of authority is not necessarily contrary to anarchism. You need to first examine the source of that authority's power, the structures which put them into power, and how that power is enforced.
If it's coercive in any way, that is, if you are threatened with violence in some way if you do not comply, then it is indeed counter to anarchism. However, that's not how anarchist brigades in 1930s Spain, the Makhnovshchina, the Korean People's Association in Manchuria, the anarchist brigades during the Russian Civil War, etc worked. First, membership was pretty much always voluntary. If you didn't want to follow an order, you didn't have to and you wouldn't be executed or tried as deserter or whatever like in most traditional armies. If you didn't want to follow an order, it was generally accepted that it was your right to refuse.
Second, there weren't set terms between elections like you might be thinking of within a modern representative democracy. If an elected officer was issuing commands the rest of the soldiers didn't agree with or like, they could be voted out at any moment, including in the middle of battle. This tended to present problems in the Spanish Civil War where the Soviet Union tried to exert complete control over everyone on the anti-fascist side. They'd send in Soviet officers to lead anarchist battalions. As soon as the Soviet gave an order that the rest didn't like, they'd vote him out. When the Soviets refused to give up authority, the entire battalion would disband, steal all their supplies, and reform a few miles away as a "new" battalion and elect their own leader.
They also weren't usually structured like we tend to think of military units with a mass of enlisted and a few detached officers issuing orders. The officers tended to come from the enlisted ranks. The officer position was less of a leader and more of a coordinator. Plans were usually made collaboratively by the whole unit (or those who cared to take part). If the heat of battle when snap decisions needed to be made, the officer tended to be the one who made those decisions, but there was no expectation that anyone who disobeyed would be killed or court-marshalled. People obeyed because they knew the person making the decision, why they were making the decision they made, and that if it was a bad decision they could replace that person.
It was called the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine led by Nestor Makhno as part of the Makhnovschina movement.
There was also the anarchist CNT-FAI which had an army of decentralized militias, collectively organized by Buenaventura Durruti during the Spanish Civil war of the 1930s.
During the Russian Revolution and early parts of the Russian Civil War, there were also a lot of anarchist militias and military units, most notably the Kronstadt sailors. The various groups never coalesced as a single army, and, therefore, were easily crushed by the Bolsheviks.
There was also the Korean People's Association in Manchuria, which was an anarchist society of more than 2 million people in the late 20s/early 30s. They never had a whole army, but they did organize militias along anarchist principles.
The Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, founded in 1994 and still active today, is organized along decentralized principles and is closely associated with anarchism.
More recently, the YPJ and PKK operating in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the militias fighting the ongoing revolution in Myanmar are not entirely anarchist, but have strong principles of direct democracy at their core.
In all instances, the overall organization of the militaries were not entirely dissimilar to a traditional military. There were enlisted soldiers led by officers who gave orders that were expected to be followed. There was a higher level command structure which organized the army to distribute resources and coordinate strategy and tactics. The big difference, however, was that the leaders (officers) tended to all be elected democratically by the people they led and could be replaced/voted out democratically whenever the people who they led decided they needed to go..
There's a common myth that anarchists are opposed to organization. Quite the opposite is true, in fact. Anarchists are all about organization. The thing we oppose is hierarchical power structures. Systems that place someone, anyone, above anyone else and say, "you must do what your superior tells you on threat of punishment" are inherently evil. But free associations are not. Rather than thinking of an officer in an anarchist militia/army as a leader whose commands must be followed or you'll face steep punishment, think of them as a central coordinator. Their directives aren't followed because you'll be court marshalled or otherwise punished if you don't obey. They're followed because people at every level are included in the process and allowed to have their voices heard. Everyone has a degree of ownership and influence over the process. People follow directives because they understand where they're coming from and why the decisions were made. Yet, if at any time someone decides they no longer want to take part, they have the option to just leave.
Yes, it's possible. Any system built by people can be destroyed by people.
Now, of course, there would be a reaction. What specifically that would be I can't say. I'd like to think it would cause serious blowback, but I'm also pretty jaded and don't really have that much faith in people all the time.