GOP senator: We have 'no discernible plan' to stop a Trump shutdown

During the campaign, Trump promised Mexico would pay for a wall on the US-Mexico border. Now Trump is threatening a government shutdown if Congress doesn’t pay a $5 billion ransom for the wall, and Congressional Republicans admit they have absolutely no clue what to do.

Until January, Republicans control the Senate, House, and White House. Trump will initiate a government shutdown at midnight on Dec. 21 looms unless Republicans find a way to keep it funded.

When asked how they plan to do it, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) shrugged and said, “There is no discernible plan — none that’s been disclosed,” according to the New York Times.

The clueless incompetence stretches to both chambers of Congress.

“No one has any idea what the play call is — we don’t know what’s going on,” retiring Rep. Ryan Costello (R-PA) told the Times.

On Meet the Press, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) reiterated that he and Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi presented Trump with more than one option to avoid a shutdown, but “all [Trump] is going to get with his temper tantrum is a shutdown. He will not get a wall.”

Schumer added that Republicans lack the “guts to tell President Trump he’s off on the deep end here.”

The lapdog attitude is par for the course for House Speaker Paul Ryan and a Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Both men have allowed Trump to run roughshod over Congress for the past two years, as both men helped the Trump administration cover up for a multitude of unethical scandals.

Republicans controlled Congress and the White House for two years, and the only significant legislative achievement is a tax scam so awful that Republicans stopped campaigning on it in the lead-up to the 2018 midterms. As their unified block of power comes to a screeching halt, Republicans can’t even figure out how to keep the lights on.

A new poll shows Americans will firmly blame Trump and the Republicans in the event of a shutdown.

As conservative scholar Norm Ornstein told the Times, “doing a shutdown while they’re still running everything just makes them look like idiots.”

Yes. Yes it does.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.