Was This On The Syllabus?

So, we've managed for the first time in our history, to shutdown the government when one party controls the White House, House and Senate.  The GOP - and to a lesser degree the NY Times - would like you to believe that this is the Democrats' fault.  (This is a concept called Murc's Law: Only Democrats have any agency, and therefore every bad thing is their fault.)

The reality is that this is an unbelievably telling crisis in how Republicans "govern."  That it happens on the first anniversary of Trump's inauguration is kind of hilariously apt.  The basic issue is that we have three separate issues:

- The government must be funded, and it will need Democratic votes in the Senate to be funded.
- The GOP Congress failed to extend funding for CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program), despite the funding lapsing back in the Fall.
- Trump rescinded DACA protections for DREAMers, setting up a showdown between "immigration hardliners" and people who aren't racist towards teenagers.

Democrats obviously have little leverage in Washington these days.  This is pretty much it.  It's worth noting that the Senate didn't even get to 50 votes, much less 60.  In order to get the Kick America In The Nuts Act passed back in December, McConnell promised a lot to Collins and Flake.  Now, they are asking to collect on those promises.  So there is a bipartisan fix in the Senate for this.  The House?  Who knows?  But, if the Senate passes a continuing resolution with a DACA-fix and CHIP extension...would Paul Ryan invoke the Hastert Rule (named after the GOP Speaker of the House who molested children) to prevent a compromise CR from passing with a bipartisan vote?

It seems obvious that this is just a great example of how the modern GOP is like a really, really bad student.  They haven't read the syllabus.  They haven't done the homework.  They aren't prepared for class.  And now there's a major paper due, and they're trying to throw all this crap together at the last minute.

These three issues are not a "crisis" that arose out of nowhere.  This could have been solved weeks or months ago.  The GOP leadership could've done some basic second grade arithmetic and realized that they would need Democratic votes for this and not waited until the last second so that Lord Smallgloves couldn't go on Twitter and kill any chance of a last-minute compromise.

We are governed by profoundly small people.