The ins and outs of government shutdown politics have come to bore and even offend me, as if all that’s at stake when the government shuts down is which party manages to escape blame. That type of coverage of shutdowns—especially these days, with one of our two parties having become a cowardly and highly regimented personal army of one man, which means it’s the more disciplined party, which may in turn help it “win”—is the moral equivalent of covering the Nanjing Massacre by marveling over the efficiency of the Japanese Imperial Army.
What does interest me, since I’ve raised the matter of morality, is the real, deeper reason this shutdown is happening. This isn’t about Obamacare subsidies. I mean, sure: they are part of the discussion. But there is something much more vital at stake here. This shutdown is happening because the aforementioned party of dictatorship wants it to happen so it can destroy the federal government and vastly reduce the number of things it does for people. It’s happening because Donald Trump’s Republican Party is depraved.
If you find my language a tad overheated, then masticate on this more anodyne description, which appeared in a Washington Post news story over the weekend: “If Congress fails to fund the government next week, the White House is preparing for a shutdown that would reflect the purest version of President Donald Trump’s vision for the federal government, guided by White House budget director Russell Vought, an architect of the controversial Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second term.”
What that means, as the Post article and other news stories have sketched out, is massive layoffs in many departments and agencies, with the hope of making as many as possible permanent. The Trump White House wants to cut the State Department by 84 percent, the Department of Housing and Urban Development by 43 percent, and the Labor Department by 35 percent. If the government shuts down Tuesday night, it wants to furlough as many people as it can get away with.
Except, of course, in two areas: immigration enforcement and defense. There, it’s party time. Immigration enforcement funding, as you may recall, grew by bajillions in the big, ugly bill, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (whose usual budget is around $9 billion) a whopping $75 billion more—$30 billion to round people up, and $45 billion to keep them in camps. As for defense spending, the Pentagon had requested $848 billion for Fiscal Year 2026. The bill sends the Pentagon more than $1 trillion.
Let’s just stop and take note of this quickly. I’m not one of those people who think we can cut defense spending in half. It’s a dangerous world, we need to arm the Ukraines of the world, et cetera. That said, most Americans have no idea what a pigfest it’s been over at the Pentagon in recent years. In FY 2016, military spending was $640 billion. For FY 2026, it’ll top $1 trillion. That’s a 54 percent increase in 10 years. Food stamp (SNAP) spending, by contrast, has gone from $92 billion in 2016 to $100 billion in 2024. And Republicans want it be much less. Some want it to be zero.
That’s the country Russ Vought, and Trump, want to give to the American people. A country where we round up and lock up millions; where defense contractors make tens of millions in unchecked profit (do you suppose it’s a coincidence that Pete Hegseth is trying to make it harder for journalists to report on these things, by making news organizations sign a pledge that they won’t seek out unauthorized sources of information?); and where everything else is cut as far down to the bone as they can get away with.
It’s all based on lies and avoiding anything that might remotely resemble democratic accountability. They lie about the impact on the deficit, which is in fact going up. They lie about their bill, which has now been law for about two months, claiming it will supercharge the economy. Economic indicators are in fact mediocre to grim, and around 60 percent of people tell pollsters the economy is getting worse. They lie about their draconian Medicaid cuts, and get away with it because they’ve postponed them until after the midterms.
In other words, they know deep-down that they’re feeding America one giant shit sandwich. And then they tell their members not to go out into their districts and do town halls! Because if they did, they’d have to answer questions from angry constituents who are onto them, as we saw over the summer among the handful of GOP House members who actually made the mistake of meeting constituents. The vast majority of them did not, serenely confident that their districts are drawn in such a way that they can get away with anything, as long as keep yelling “Long live Trump!” and issuing warnings about transgender antifa border crossers. Meanwhile, one of the fastest growing cohorts of the disillusioned, according to recent polls, are Republican voters.
And what gets me most of all: They think, or at least they say, that they’re doing all this in the name of Jesus. As I write these words on Sunday morning, I have little doubt that Speaker Mike Johnson is duly and responsibly at church, praying devoutly to the Lord of Kings to whom he has pledged his soul. Because as we all know, Jesus wanted governments to take money from poor people and give it to rich people, believed that strangers among us should be spurned and even detained, and taught we should hate people who aren’t like us. These are sick, sick people.
If this shutdown happens, sure, Democrats should scream about the cuts to healthcare subsidies. They are likely to affect some 20 million people, including a hell of a lot of Trump voters. But I hope that when the cuts and furloughs kick in, when the federal government is slicing away at services to people and building more and more concentration camps, the Democrats have a language to talk to the American people about that in moral terms. What the Republicans are doing to this country is deeply immoral, under the orders of a man who has the conscience of a hyena. Say it, Democrats.
The post What’s Really Behind the Shutdown: the GOP’s
Immoral Priorities appeared first on New Republic.
