(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The looming federal shutdown is a GOP civil war and the public is caught in the crossfire. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-29 A federal shutdown driven by wild MAGA obstructionism. An illegal plot to impeach a Justice. In a moment that tests our democracy, our job is to organize. Read on, and become one of 50 new monthly donors by midnight 9/30 to help us pass. The looming federal shutdown is a GOP civil war and the public is caught in the crossfire. The headlines about McCarthy’s weakness speak to an upstream cause: If Dems had won 6,670 more votes in the five closest House races in 2022, the ultra-MAGA faction would be powerless now. This isn’t a bipartisan shutdown. This isn’t even about the GOP taking the federal government hostage in order to hurt Democrats, as previous shutdowns have been. This is a shutdown about nothing. This is a purely Republican shutdown—driven by the division between MAGA Republicans and ultra-MAGA Republicans, with the needs and voices of voters nowhere in the equation. The human toll that a shutdown will exact on the public is painful to review, but far more painful for those experiencing it. Read this briefing. Service members, law enforcement, and air traffic controllers will soon be forced to work without pay. Public health, food safety, and environmental protections will be undermined. Travelers will begin to experience significant travel delays. Wisconsin health centers are already feeling the pressure and anxiety that a shutdown would cause. In a shutdown, women and children who rely on food assistance will soon be turned away at grocery stores as funding dries up, restricting access to vital nutrition and food security for millions of American women, children, and infants. At the same time, a shutdown would immediately cut off access to Head Start for 10,000 kids around the country, ensuring that low-income families with children no longer have access to quality education. The effects of a shutdown are vicious. Even more vicious is what ultra-MAGA Republicans are demanding in order to avert a shutdown. The ultra-MAGA’s proposed cuts include: slashing Title I funding, the federal program which provides aid to low-income schools; robbing 65,000 children of access to child care, stripping 60,000 seniors of essential nutrition services cutting 110,000 Head Start slots that families with young kids depend on waitlisting over 2.1 million low-income mothers and children from nutrition aid… but their hunger can’t wait … and Speaker McCarthy has now endorsed these cuts. Underneath this horror show is a deeper failure of democracy. Wisconsin is a 50-50 state—and yet we’ve got Republicans in 6 out of 8 of our Congressional districts, and under current lines, four of those districts are rigged for overwhelming Republican victories. x REASON ONE: GERRYMANDERED MAPS Wisconsin voted for Dems in 14 of the last 17 statewide elections, but is close to GOP supermajorities in both legislative chambers. We have eight Congressional districts—and six of our House reps are Republicans. Why? Partisan gerrymandering. — Ben Wikler (@benwikler) January 31, 2023 Wisconsin isn’t alone; across the country, Republicans have designed districts where the only thing they have to worry about is a primary challenge from the right. Combine locked-in R gerrymandered districts with right-wing media—from talk radio and Fox News to the far-right internet—and you wind up with a GOP consumed by its own debates about how to hurt poor people, seniors, and middle-class workers. This disaster is daily life in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin GOP’s response to our child care crisis, and the Governor’s call for a special session to allocate funding to address it, was to kill the funding and propose lowering standards for child care centers. x NEW: Last week, I surveyed the full Wisconsin State Legislature, asking all 132 legislators to take public positions and offer feedback on my plan to address our state’s workforce challenges and prevent a looming child care crisis. Not one Republican responded. Not one. https://t.co/07ztGCQJOo — Governor Tony Evers (@GovEvers) September 20, 2023 Meanwhile, the GOP’s response to many of Wisconsinites’ top concerns has been to do nothing at all. The Wisconsin legislature has simply refused to do anything about a slew of major challenges in which the public overwhelmingly favors action. Medicaid expansion. Reproductive freedom. Gun violence prevention. Governor Evers proposes common-sense policies in his biennial budgets—and the GOP strips out those provisions. Democratic and bipartisan bills alike are denied hearings. Even when Gov. Evers calls special sessions of the legislature on these topics, the GOP just gavels in and gavels out. In Wisconsin and nationally, the problem that underlies MAGA extremism is the short-circuiting of democracy. When politicians lose their jobs if they betray the people who elected them, they learn quickly to actually listen to their constituents. Without that check, extremism thrives. MAGA extremists know this. The MAGA Republicans driving the shutdown nationally and the MAGA Republicans pushing impeachment in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court are both examples of a Republican party that believes it has no accountability to the general public. We’ve got 403 days until November 5, 2024. Between now and then, democracy will be tested, and the GOP will search for disastrous new ways to turn their lack of democratic accountability into bad policy. But the real test is the one that each of us faces: what will we do, in this time of challenge? How will we rise to this fight? What kind of democracy will we build for future generations? Tomorrow is our end-of-quarter deadline. It’s also the last day Congress has to act before the government shuts down. We’re in this for the long haul—so we’re looking for small-dollar monthly donors who will pitch in whatever they can each month. Will you join us? (Our goal before 11:59pm on 9/30 is to welcome 50 new monthly donors who will help us fight back and fight hard through the 2024 elections. Monthly donors allow us to plan long-term. Any recurring amount helps. Chip in before end of quarter.) Let’s attend to the crisis of this shutdown, and the abuses of power in our legislature. And at the same time, let’s keep an eye focused on the broader fight—for a state, and a nation, where the will of the people can be the law of the land. It’s a dream worth fighting for. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/29/2196286/-The-looming-federal-shutdown-is-a-GOP-civil-war-and-the-public-is-caught-in-the-crossfire Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/