In the fabulous Broadway musical Gypsy!, the pushy stage mother Mama Rose, played by the great Ethel Merman, belts out the show's signature song, "Everything's Coming Up Roses," as her daughter Louise (later known as "Gypsy") prepared to go on the stage at a run-down burlesque house.
Curtain up
Light the lights
You got nothin' to hit but the heights
You'll be swell, you'll be great
I can tell, just you wait
That lucky star I talk about is due
Honey, everything's comin' up roses
For me and for you
For both Democrats and Republicans, It's Showtime!
At the stroke of midnight on Wednesday morning, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will turn into a pumpkin. Or is it a handsome prince? Maybe a frog?
Whatever he becomes—the government will shut down, the world will end, Democrats and Republicans will be sleeping together—mass hysteria!
As we all know by now, no such thing will happen. The world will continue to spin on its axis, babies will be born, people will die, and Democrats will continue to think up ways to take your money and spend it on stuff like a transgender wellness center or a monument to serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who may have murdered 33 or more young men but was a loyal Democrat.
This is easily the weirdest shutdown production I've seen. The bottom line is that both sides want the government to shut down. Both sides think the other side will be blamed for it, and right now, Trump has a distinct upper hand. He has a House GOP-passed Continuing Resolution (CR) that will keep the government open for another 7 weeks while the Republican Senate passes budget bills for each federal department.
It's going to be very hard for Chuck Schumer to make the case that Democrats can't allow Republicans to run the government for another seven weeks while negotiations continue.
But Schumer and the Democrats have their backs against the wall. They're facing an angry, sullen, murderous base of rabid, far-left kooks who blindly want to "Fight! Fight! Fight."
What exactly does the base want to "fight" for? We'll get back to you on that.
“I think there’s a 99 percent chance that there’s a shutdown. There just doesn’t seem to be any endgame for either party to get out of a shutdown,” said Brian Darling, a GOP strategist and former Senate aide.
“Republicans want to show that they want to get their priorities funded, and I think the Democrats need to dig in and show that they can fight. I think both parties have an incentive from their base to shut their government down, it’s just a matter of how long,” he said.
There you have it. Both sides prefer the theater of a shutdown to doing any actual, you know, work.
President Donald Trump is probably grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
Trump has made it clear he’s not ready to offer any concessions to Schumer and Jeffries. He’s also prepared to make the shutdown as painful as possible for Democrats by prioritizing funding for Republican requests and shifting money from Democratic-leaning states to GOP strongholds.
The White House on Wednesday stepped up its pressure on Democrats to back down and accept a House-passed stopgap funding measure by circulating a memo warning of mass layoffs.
The memo directs agencies to use a shutdown as an “opportunity to consider reduction in force (RIF) notices to all employees in programs, projects or activities” if the funding for those programs lapses Oct. 1 and they are not “consistent with the president’s priorities."
As for the Democrats, they're fighting for their political lives. Not against Republicans, but against their own rabid left wing, who are about to go all Götterdämmerung on the Democratic Party and blow it all up.
Democratic leaders want to avoid a repeat of the March budget showdown, when a handful of Democrats — including Schumer — voted for a GOP funding bill out of the reasonable fear that a shutdown would empower Trump to further gut the federal bureaucracy. After intense blowback, the party’s leaders now believe they cannot accept anything less than significant concessions — or they risk a full-blown revolt. Schumer fears a primary challenge from his left in 2028.
So Trump will sit in the White House, pulling the strings of what may be the biggest, bloodiest, most impactful change in government personnel since its founding.
Stay tuned. The finale is going to be a genuine boffo!
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