This is 100% the CEO's decision. Remember, he rejected a perfectly good funding plan that was put forward by his own allies back in December, before his enemies took over the board on January 3.

The President makes budget requests to Congress before the budget committees plan and submit their appropriations bills.

The perfectly good funding plan did not include the budget requests the President made. Whether you agree with his politics or not is immaterial. It is not 100% his decision.

Right. It's the majority leader's decision to override a veto or keep putting bills on the floor. This is a multi-level catastrophe fabricated by disgusting people.

And the Congress is by no means required to give the President everything he asks for.

The perfectly good funding plan was given to Trump by his allies when they controlled both houses, it was the most favorable plan he could ever possibly get. It even had some wall funding in it. It was 100% his decision to veto it, and 100% his stupid fault for thinking that he could get more concessions from his enemies than he could from his friends, right after those enemies won the House by the largest popular vote margin in history.

I commend you for being motivated but this doesn't match the actual facts.

President Trump has not vetoed a single bill during his term of office thus far. Go look this up if you do not believe me. Please see spurcell93's sibling comment to yours in this thread.

No, he didn't, he called Paul Ryan and said "if you don't give me XYZ demands that Mitch McConnel wouldn't let me have I'll veto the bill and shut down the government" and then Ryan flopped around like a fish and then the shutdown started. It was still Trump's veto that started the whole thing, the fact that it was threatened instead of exercised makes no difference.

That's a complete fabrication.

Paul Ryan and the House passed a budget bill that included wall funding.

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/20/678602214/senate-approves-tem...

The Senate failed to pass a compatible budget bill because Democrats refused to include any funding for a wall.

> Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, of New York, pledged to continue the discussions, but said it was clear there are not enough votes to pass a spending measure that includes funding for a wall along the nation’s southern border.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/21/gove...

I think you're mostly right, so please don't take this the wrong way, but I think you might be overstating your case to say that GP's take is a complete fabrication. There were veto threats involved that led directly to the shutdown, specifically pertaining to a stop-gap that would have run till February 8th.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/26/trump-says-he-will-wait-to-g...

Thank you, you're right, that's important to include.

But that's the only detail of the story told above that's true.

Thank you for trying. We're in the post-facts era of journalism and most people just recite what supports their worldview.

I don't even support Trump, but I can't simply state facts anymore because they don't support the mainstream narrative. The emperor has no clothes.

In a corporation or other well designed systems there's a clear chain of authority. In the US we have two different branches that can both claim to have a mandate from the people that can get into fights. The designers of the US constitution did better than I would have with the information available to them but we've had lots of sorts of democratic republic tried since then and now we know that US style presidential systems usually end up falling apart fairly quickly. We're lucky that we had Washington as a good example of temperance and then then the weight of tradition keeping our system afloat.

And a few years after Washington we'd have the current vice president and the former secretary of the treasury engage in a duel to the death! Claiming temperance is what kept our system afloat is probably a bit of a stretch. The American political system is literally designed to be dysfunctional. This is what checks and balances are all about. One clique wants A, one clique wants B. If they can't come to a compromise then nobody gets anything. The idea was to keep the government small and avoid a tyranny of the majority.

What's really changed since then is that government has grown unimaginably larger than the forefathers ever imagined possible, let alone intended. And we've also massively increased the power of various branches. For instance, that the president alone can now unilaterally deploy our military throughout the world is just insane and arguably completely unconstitutional. In any case it completely destroys the entire system of checks and balances that our system, and country, was built and prospered upon.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by system such as ours failing, nor that our system was kept afloat by tradition. We started a revolution against a heavily centralized mercantalistic monarchical empire to create a decentralized capitalistic democratic republic.

The problem with "nobody gets anything" is that it's unworkable in the long run and sooner or later someone decides to just ignore the rules with popular support. See How Democracies Die for a book length treatment but I believe that's an uncontroversial statement about the political science consensus.

I'm not saying it's temperance that keeps the US together (except for the first 8 years) but rather tradition. Long standing institutions tend to amass legitimacy over time.

It's not so much that we have a larger country these days as that we have ideologically distinct parties. We had real ideological distinctions between the Democractic Republicans and the Federalists in the old days and in addition to what you mention there were people considering a military coup if the election of 1800 went the wrong way. Thankfully the Federalists imploded and for a long time parties were mostly patronage machines, though you did have the pro-science, pro-religion, pro-treating other races with respect party versus the pro-freedom, pro-small government, pro-treating other religions with respect party as sort of vague ideologies. Except for the bit where they polarized over slavery and we immediately had a civil war. After progressive reforms made patronage less of an issue the two parties were both still ideologically mixed until the South defected to the Republicans and things have been polarizing ever since.

Right now we're in a situation where the most conservative Democrat in Congress is more liberal than the most liberal Republican, a situation that is basically unprecedented. I don't expect the current system to break soon, hundreds of years of tradition is pretty resilient, but if the current level of partisan divide and constitutional hardball continues it will break down eventually.

No, it really is the finance department. Boards vote on the CEO and serve as his advisors and that is certainly not the correct metaphor.

More importantly, Congress sets the budget through the House and Senate budget committees, which then draft and pass appropriations bills. This is the point in the process where we are stuck.

The President is saying "bring me budget bills that have the things I want and I won't veto them" and Congress is saying no. It's nothing new really, barely anyone knows basic civics and so people are letting their emotions drive their opinions.

Both parties here are playing games that affect peoples' lives and are both worthy of blame.

Again, I'd have to respectfully disagree here.

The US Treasury Department is most analogous to the finance department of most corporations. Which, incidentally, is also shutdown right now because the board and the ceo told them to close. (Just as an additional point of fact, the finance department of many organizations does not set departmental budgets. That's not how it works. One of the reasons they exist is to, "finance", projects. Which could involve the use of any number of financial vehicles.)

Congressional appropriations bills are exactly how projects get financed in government. All this does it make it all the more clear to me that you don't know how this process works.

You still have provided zero justification for Congress being the "board" even though it is a terrible metaphor.

Wow.

Relax guy. We can just agree to disagree. No worries.

I just thought that since the Founders' intended congress to act as a check and balance on the president it's pretty much analogous to the boards that act as a check and balance on a given ceo in your average corporate structure. It also seemed reasonable to view Treasury as the finance department.

But seriously, no worries if you see things differently. No biggie man.

You have a nice rest of your day.

Boards are very much like the parliament in a parliamentary system. Voters/shareholders elect the parliament/board who appoint the prime minister/CEO.

There just isn't a good analogy to be found with the US system because corporations don't have the same structure as the US government.

That is the point in the process where we are stuck now, but not where the sticking began a month ago. Trump had a perfectly good budget on his desk, written by his allies and passed by Republicans, and it even had wall funding in it, and he vetoed it because it wasn't enough. Then the government shut down. Then the Democrats took control.

You posted a similar fiction more than once so I'll post the same correction in both places.

The House passed a budget bill that included wall funding.

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/20/678602214/senate-approves-tem...

It never reached the President's desk because the Senate failed to pass a compatible budget bill when Democrats refused to include any funding for a wall.

> Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, of New York, pledged to continue the discussions, but said it was clear there are not enough votes to pass a spending measure that includes funding for a wall along the nation’s southern border.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/21/gove...

The house only passed that bill because Trump called Paul Ryan personally and said he would veto the bipartisan budget that was on the table and passed by the Senate. This is no fiction, it is Trump's shutdown

Everyone knows Trump's refusing to sign a budget without wall funding, that's no secret.

The part you left out is that the Democrats blocked a bill with wall funding, even before they took over the House. Trump never "had a perfectly good budget on his desk, written by his allies and passed by Republicans".

Both parties put this issue ahead of the continued operation of the government and both are responsible for the shutdown.

Trump hasn't vetoed anything.

Neither party has "had control" in the senate for years. It takes 60 votes in the senate to pass a budget, and neither party has had that.

The situation is far more complex than you're stating it.