In my opinion it's possible the Democrats will cave. The strategic situation is that Democrats care about the country, and Trump does not. However, not enough Americans are convinced of the latter fact. Once they are, the only rational decision is to cave - and then remove him from office as quickly as possible.
The logical play is that any wall is a long-running project. They can promise Trump anything to get him to sign the budget, and then immediately unwind their efforts once the smoke clears. I honestly want to see them push a budget with something like "Canadian style health care plus a wall" to see if he bites.
How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself
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Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> at some point the democrats will have to concede that the only way to stop the damage is to give in. Which would be the point where your 'they care more' hypothesis would become true. So are they just wanting to hurt him politically right now?
Right now they think they are playing the game "who loses more, politically", in which the president is losing bigly. Or at least they act as if they believe the president cares about his reelection chances. But as more and more time passes, and he loses more and more support, it will become obvious to even some of his supporters, that he will burn down the country to get his way. And at that point he may get his wal…
I care about things moving forward. And if we assume that he's not about that, then we need to start moving our gaze to those who are the actors that should be acting correctly and having things move forward. They're not doing that.
Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself
#73Why don't they use the Canadian National Research Council bulletin? http://time5.nrc.ca/timefreq/bulletin_tf-b.html In Canada if a budget isn't passed it triggers an election. We don't have government shutdowns.
If you do, you probably should use https. https://time5.nrc.ca/timefreq/bulletin_tf-b.html There's probably some really weird MITM attack possibilities here if people have automated systems fetching and using these files. Also, following the link from the article, it would seem the US government's official source is unencrypted FTP?
Re: How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now they think they are playing the game "who loses more, politically", in which the president is losing bigly. Or at least they act as if they believe the president cares about his reelection chances. But as more and more time passes, and he loses more and more support, it will become obvious to even some of his supporters, that he will burn down the country to get his way. And at that point he may get his wal…
I don't care about him all that much. As you imply, he'll do whatever he wants to get whatever he wants. I care about things moving forward. And if we assume that he's not about that, then we need to start moving our gaze to those who are the actors that should be acting correctly and having things move forward. They're not doing that.
One of the huge criticisms that I have is that you can't get rid of an administration. Impeachment seems to be virtually impossible, whatever Trump does or did. And even then you get a vice president who ran on the same ticket and profited from the same criminal behavior.
In Germany, we can get rid of the chancellor within days or weeks, depending on the procedure. We also can't have split governments sabotaging everything. Every vote counts the same etc.