Washington is staring into the abyss of its third shutdown in two years. Say what you want about the political utility of a shutdown (and, believe me, the talking heads will spare no words), but one significant advantage they provide is to clarify the field of battle.

Thanks to the ongoing shutdown theater, two things are now obvious.

First, Republican leadership in Congress had no intention of even trying to fund Trump’s wall, much less actually doing it, despite repeatedly promising to do so.

And second, Trump is being exactly who he said he was, and doing exactly what he said he’d do, and all of greater Washington is still shocked—shocked!—by it.

To the first point, departing House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have been leading Trump down the primrose path on the wall since January 2017. Days after the president was sworn in, Ryan and McConnell held a joint press conference pledging that they would use their unified government to, among other things, repeal Obamacare, pass tax reform, pass an infrastructure bill, and give the president $12 to $15 billion for the wall.

None of that, save tax reform (these are still Republicans, after all, so corporate priorities!) got done. Excuses were made. $1.6 billion for border security was tossed into the March omnibus, with prohibitions on any of it being used to build Trump’s wall prototypes. When Trump got restless before the midterms, Ryan and McConnell held him off by promising “a big fight”on the wall in the lame duck.

None emerged, so here we are.

Read more -→ https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/22/obstructionist-republicans-vs-trump/