To what end, this government shutdown?  The Democrats keep doubling down in their foot-stomping, incalcitrant nihilism, acting as if they didn’t lose the House, Senate, and White House in last year’s elections.

They, the party of chaos, seem to relish the potential of food riots after SNAP food benefits are cut off for 42 million people, the grinding of flight travel down to a trickle, or worse.  Does the prospect of night skies lit up from the flames of burning police cars and buildings, with all the attendant violence, incite giddy reminiscence of the days of 2020?

Surely the Democrats cannot believe that most Americans are gullible enough to blame Republicans for the fallout from the shutdown.  Have they painted themselves in a corner?  Are they trapped on a head-on collision course from which their egos prohibit any deviation, or do they hope to trap the Republicans into breaking the stalemate by revoking the filibuster?

Granted, if the Democrats managed to win back Congress and the White House, they could kill the filibuster themselves, and thereby disencumber themselves from the 60-vote Senate majority required to pass major legislation.  But if the Republicans were to torch the filibuster first, the Democrats, back in power, could frolic their way toward ramming most of their agenda though with a 51-Senate majority vote, without worrying about blowback from those rarely sighted blue dog Democrats who may yet linger in the halls of Congress.  The left could dismember what’s left of our Republic in a few short months.

According to The Hill,

Senate Republicans are increasingly chattering about changing the filibuster’s rules if Democrats do not end the shutdown, even though Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) says he opposes weakening a tool safeguarding the minority’s power. ...

“I think the pressure from the White House will become pretty enormous,” said one Republican senator, who requested anonymity, predicting Trump will demand GOP leaders find a way to end the shutdown, even if it means blowing up the filibuster.

The Dems have been clear about what they plan to do: pack the Supreme Court (and maybe other federal courts), grant statehood to the District of Colombia (and maybe Puerto Rico), get rid of the Electoral College, federalize elections.  Then there’s back to the future of open borders tied to a runaway welfare state, plus millions of new voters indebted to their Democrat benefactors.  Woke will return with a capital W, along with unknown but likely disturbing levels of retribution.

Jamie Raskin, wannabe Robespierre to Democrat Jacobeans, harbors vengeful urges against a wide swath of Americans:

We need to be engaging in far more work of transnational democratic solidarity with the democratic governments and the democratic movements and peoples and parties of the world, to try to prevent the spread of the lawlessness and the fascist chaos that’s been unleashed against us. ... But implicit in it should be the idea that if and when we come back to power, and we will, we are not going to look kindly upon people who facilitated, to use a word of the day, who facilitated authoritarianism in our country. That’s an assault on our constitution and on our people.

Until Donald Trump left office, it had been an unwritten rule that ex-presidents were left alone upon leaving office, no matter how much they were vilified while serving as president.  Trump had no sooner won the Republican nomination in 2016 than the coordinated efforts to rid the country of him commenced.  After Biden won the 2020 election, the Democrats leveled scores of specious indictments in multiple venues against citizen Trump.  They wanted him hauled off to Rikers Island.

Unsurprisingly, President Trump seeks justice for some of the most egregious perpetrators of unlawful and unconstitutional actions against him, and by extension the entire country.  Many people decry this as personal retribution and rail against the character of his public persona.  As if moral rectitude has ever been a valid indicator of political leaders!

Cultural changes generally precede political ones, and there are signs that the culture is changing for the better.  Purging the radical left’s contagion from our politics will take a few years.  Let’s hope we have the time and the will to do so.

Image: Senate majority leader John Thune (R-S.D.).  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.