Thread: Poll: 47% of Americans blame Trump for government shutdown

Poll: 47% of Americans blame Trump for government shutdown

A new poll from Reuters/Ipsos reveals that 47 percent of adults hold Trump responsible for the shutdown

Dec. 27, 2018 / 3:59 PM EST
By Reuters

More Americans blame President Donald Trump than congressional Democrats for the partial U.S. government shutdown, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday found, as lawmakers returned to Washington with no quick end to the shutdown in sight.

Forty-seven percent of adults in the U.S. hold Trump responsible, while 33 percent blame Democrats in Congress, according to the Dec. 21-25 poll, conducted mostly after the shutdown began. Seven percent of Americans blamed congressional Republicans.

The shutdown was triggered by Trump’s demand, largely opposed by Democrats and some Republicans, that taxpayers provide him with $5 billion to help pay for a wall he wants to build on the Mexican border. Its total estimated cost is $23 billion.

Just 35 percent of those surveyed in the Reuters/Ipsos poll said they backed including money for the wall in a congressional spending bill. Only 25 percent said they supported Trump shutting down the government over the matter.

The shutdown, now in its sixth day, has a had limited impact so far, partly due to vacations for the 800,000 federal workers affected, though that could change soon.

Government agencies began notifying the public on Thursday about service disruptions. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said the shutdown means it cannot process new flood insurance policies, possibly disrupting home sales.

The Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal workforce, offered advice to government employees on staving off creditors if paychecks lapse.

On Capitol Hill, the Senate and House of Representatives were set to reconvene late on Thursday, but no prompt action by them was expected. The lack of urgency fueled speculation among analysts that the shutdown could drag on well into January.

The wall dispute coincided with the expiration of funding for about 20 percent of the government. The remaining 80 percent is fully funded and is unaffected by the shutdown.

The departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Agriculture, Commerce and other agencies, shut down “non-essential” operations on Saturday after a tentative funding deal collapsed over Trump’s renewed insistence that wall funding be provided.

The House has approved a shutdown-ending spending measure that includes Trump’s demand for $5 billion, but its prospects in the Senate were seen as poor.

Trump argues that his wall is needed to stem illegal immigration and drugs entering the country - a key plank in his 2016 presidential campaign.

Earlier this month, he said he would be “proud to shut down the government” over wall funding. On Twitter, since the shutdown started, he has tried to blame the Democrats.

In a tweet on Thursday, he framed the shutdown as a partisan issue, saying, “Do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats?”

The assertion, for which Trump provided no evidence, drew immediate criticism from Democrats.

“Federal employees don’t go to work wearing red or blue jerseys,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner wrote on Twitter.

“They’re public servants. And the president is treating them like poker chips at one of his failed casinos,” Warner said.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English across the United States. It gathered responses from 2,440 adults, including 946 Democrats and 846 Republicans. It has a credibility interval, a measure of the poll’s precision, of two percentage points for the entire sample and four points for members of either political party.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...utdown-n952466

Shutdowns are losers. Always. DUMB.

President Trump Is Right: Shut It Down

• JED BABBIN

December 17, 2018, 12:05 am

In the face of Democrat recklessness, there’s no other way to bring order to American immigration policy.

The Tuesday showdown between President Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal) was not supposed to be a press event but Trump, ever the stage manager, made sure it was. He turned it into a good political scrap.

At the meeting voices were raised, fingers were pointed and — according to the Washington Post — Chuck and Nancy showed that Trump was “malleable” — i.e., unserious — about building the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

But Trump said then that he’s willing to force a showdown in the form of a government shutdown over funding for the wall. He said, “I am proud to shut down the government for border security. I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down.”

The Democrats and the media (please pardon the redundancy) treat government shutdowns as something akin to the apocalypse. The Dems always insist that it’s the Republicans’ fault, the media play along, and the Republicans usually don’t say anything that bulls through all the media/Dem manure.

We know — because it’s the law, and because of our experience with them — that government shutdowns don’t put the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard on leave. The Border Patrol and customs agencies aren’t laid off. And TSA doesn’t stop screening airport passengers.

What’s closed down are agencies such as the Energy Department (which doesn’t generate a single kilowatt-hour of electric power), the Education Department (which doesn’t teach anyone anything except how to be a bureaucrat), and the Labor Department (which performs no useful work). These — and hundreds more such agencies — are parts of the government that could be permanently closed without damaging our republic.

And, before we shed a tear about the lost wages of all those government employees, let’s remember that the first thing Congress does when a shutdown ends is pass a special appropriation bill that gives them back pay for the lost time. It’s nothing more than a forced — and paid — vacation.

Government shutdowns are games of political chicken to determine who caves in first, Congress or the White House.

Sometimes they are wasted and produce no useful political product. Such was the January 2018 shutdown over the Obama “Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals” — DACA — program. It lasted three days, the White House caved in, and nothing was accomplished.

On the other hand, government shutdowns that are done at the right time and for the right reason can be highly productive.

Remember the last big shutdown? In 2013, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx) provoked a sixteen-day shutdown with his twenty-one hour filibuster trying to block funding of Obamacare. Cruz and the Republicans were bashed roundly and soundly in the media. The Democrats raised hell about it until the election the following year.

And in the 2014 midterm elections, American voters showed how angry at Republicans they were by giving them control of the Senate for the first time in a decade. They needed six seats to take over. They won eight.

Cruz’s filibuster wasn’t the precipitating cause of the Senate takeover, but it helped. And the 2018 short shutdown wasn’t the cause of the big Dem win in November. In both cases, the results were more a product of presidential unpopularity — and disgust at congressional inaction — than anything else.

Which makes a shutdown over Christmas a very attractive prospect.

The entire Democratic Party is in a very bad place on border security. Their position is the most radical — open borders and no border fence — and is not just at odds with Trump’s base but also with the majority of American voters. If the president, the conservative media, and enough Republicans in the congressional and gubernatorial ranks play it right, they will be big winners, not sinners.

People — at least those who haven’t tuned out politics entirely — are properly disgusted with congressional inaction on immigration and border security. But they have imposed a divided government on us for the next two years, which means that nothing will be done on immigration for at least that time.

But that doesn’t mean the American voters don’t expect something to be done about the problem of people setting a toe in U.S. territory and claiming asylum. They see the flood of illegal immigrants coming over and around the partially-built fence. And, especially in the border states, they are suffering directly from the nearly-unrestricted flow of immigrants into the U.S.

People don’t yet understand that Trump has no other option than a government shutdown so he has to explain it repeatedly. The border wall is the only way to get the immigration mess under some semblance of control, especially since the Dems will block any effort at reforming the immigration and asylum laws for the next two years.

Trump has already been too reasonable and willing to compromise. The cost of the wall will be around $25 billion but Trump is seeking only $5 billion now and has agreed to seek the rest in increments, which means he’ll have this fight again and again. He can’t afford to lose a single round.

The president needs to force the shutdown and bring every gun to bear on the border wall issue.

He can raise hell on Twitter every day the government is shut down but he needs to do more.

The day of the shutdown — it will inevitably be called the “Christmas Shutdown” — should be the day he delivers an Oval Office speech to the American people. He should blame Schumer and Pelosi personally, making them the issue. Neither is popular except in the East and West Coast regions from which they came.

The speech should include many of the names of Americans — such as Kate Steinle, the young woman gunned down by an illegal alien in San Francisco — who have died because the illegal immigration problem hasn’t been solved. And Trump should hammer the Dems about that, just as he did in the 2016 campaign.

After that, he — and as many Republican governors, senators, and congressmen he can corral — should be on television blasting Schumer and Pelosi for closing down the government instead of appropriating the funds to build the wall.

This won’t be a three-day shutdown. It could go on for a month or more. So be it.

https://spectator.org/president-trum...-shut-it-down/

Just words, no reality to them, MW. Sad and pathetic misinformation. There is no way to win this, we don't have the votes and we aren't going to get them. This is a loser from A to Z. You'll see. A terrible blunder.

Originally Posted by Judy

Just words, no reality to them, MW. Sad and pathetic misinformation. There is no way to win this, we don't have the votes and we aren't going to get them. This is a loser from A to Z. You'll see. A terrible blunder.

I've never suggested we would get the funding from the shut down, however, it was a fight Trump had to have. To do otherwise would have further eroded his base of support. Caving with no fight was not an option. Most of us are aware of that reality.

You do realize you're taking the side of the Democrats and RINOs on this, don't you?

It's math. It doesn't have a "side". If it's -10 degrees outside, whether you're a DemoQuack, a RINO, a Republican, a Conservative, a Greenie, a Weenie, or whatever you want to use as labels, you're going to freeze to death if you don't find warm shelter. When you don't have the votes and aren't going to get them, a government shutdown isn't going to change that math, so it's not a fight, it's suicide.

Originally Posted by Judy

It's math. It doesn't have a "side". If it's -10 degrees outside, whether you're a DemoQuack, a RINO, a Republican, a Conservative, a Greenie, a Weenie, or whatever you want to use as labels, you're going to freeze to death if you don't find warm shelter. When you don't have the votes and aren't going to get them, a government shutdown isn't going to change that math, so it's not a fight, it's suicide.

An opinion many of us don't share.

Sounds to me like you're from the breed that sent 2,709,000 Americans to Vietnam to fight a war they couldn't win. My breed calls them suicide missions.

Originally Posted by Judy

Sounds to me like you're from the breed that sent 2,709,000 Americans to Vietnam to fight a war they couldn't win. My breed calls them suicide missions.

I'd love to banter with you all night (not really), but it's time for this soldier to march off to bed. Goodnight.