Oh, Democrats: You’re Doing The Right Thing For The Wrong Reasons

There are lots of very good reasons to shut down the current U.S. government.

I’ve mentioned many of them here.

And preserving the health insurance subsidy for the 20 million people who depend on it and will lose it if the Republicans succeed would be a good reason.

I mean, American health insurance is a bad system but it’s what we have at the moment so 20 million people losing access to even that would be bad.

But that’s not what the Democrats have said they’re after.

What the Democrats are demanding is just a one-year extension on that subsidy, so the subsidy will still expire as the Republicans want but slightly after the next scheduled election. But the subsidies are extremely popular with the voting public, so you’d think that delaying taking away healthcare from 20 million people till after the next Congressional election should be a Republican demand.

Since, ya know, the Republicans are the ones cancelling the popular subsidies so they’re the ones who should expect to lose voters over having done it.

Yeah, it really is that stupid.

Clearly, our Democrats isn’t learning.

In the current fascist couping environment, issuing a demand that the other party wants in exchange for voting for more fascist couping is … less than ideal.

There are legitimate demands the Democrats could be making:

rein in the DHS/ICE/etc goon squads
stop the exrta-judicial murders by the Navy
stop the government interference with universities and corporations
force the executive to follow Congressional budget allocations
re-instate the illegally-fired officials in the executive
do something about the rampant bribery
oh, so very many more

These are all existential issues for the country itself; a short-term extension timed to electorally benefit the Republicans is not.

Or did I miss a memo and now the Democrats actually support the coup?

Because right now they’re offering to vote to continue all those things in exchange for something that frankly the Republicans should want anyway.

And that’s a really, really bad look for the opposition party during a coup.

So please, Congressional Democrats, you need to get some real demands; demands that would actually do something about the damage this coup is doing to the country.

It can be OK to do something good for a bad reason; at least you’ve done something good. You’ve slowed down the destruction of this country by a fascist coup. That’s good.

But now that the shutdown has started, voting to re-fund the coup in exchange for a one-year insurance subsidy extension would be doing a bad thing for a bad reason. You’d have brought the coup back up to speed again, and that’s bad.

And voting to bypass the shutdown restrictions to continue paying the military that the coup is deploying against the citizens of three cities already would be very bad.