The U.S. government is going to shut down in an hour and 5 minutes.

While I hate to see the inconvenience this will impose on hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors, I applaud Chuck Schumer for taking a principled stand. The republicans have worked themselves into a corner where they have absolutely no credibility with respect to a promissory note to fix important issues later.  Schumer and the democrats recognized that it’s now or never.

With the ensuing chaos that will start tomorrow morning where Dick Mulveyney will need to decide what stays open and what closes, there exists a clear inconvenience to republicans to come to the table and negotiate.  Trump might have to postpone a golf game or two.  The party celebrating the one year anniversary of his inauguration is in jeopardy.  It’ll be interesting to see if he holds it.  It would be incredibly bad optics.

Schumer played this poker hand pretty well this time.  Basically called republicans’ bluff that Dems would take the heat for a shut-down.  On the contrary.

If he’s able to negotiate a deal for the Dreamers and get funding for CHIP, he’ll have accomplished two things.  One, his principled stand will get looked at as what resolved the Dreamers issue.  Two, he will have established credibility that democrats are willing to call McConnell’s bluff if they feel like public opinion is on their side.  These are two very important accomplishments that need to happen in order to fix the ‘tude problem on the other side of the aisle.