7th September 2017, 3:46 PM
If things got bad enough that would probably be defensible...
But otherwise, something quite interesting happened recently: Trump decided to back the Democrats' plan for hurricane relief and increasing the debt limit. The Republicans wanted separate bills for the debt limit and hurricane relief funding, and wanted a long-term debt limit bill that raised it until after the 2018 election, since their base hates raising the debt limit and it's a very difficult bill to pass in the Republican party. The Democrats however wanted a short-term 3 month debt limit bill that also funded hurricane relief, in order to get that done and also get a lot more leverage in December when the debt limit will need to be raised again. They claimed that they would oppose a longer-term debt limit bill, but that is unlikely to be true if it was actually up to a final vote. There is no good reason for Trump to support the Democratic position here, it makes getting major legislation done this year -- such as the tax bill he claims to badly want -- a lot harder. Plus the speculation is that Dems will demand that DACA funding (for the Dreamers) in the debt limit bill that will need to be done in December, too, to keep that program going despite Trump's awful actions on that recently.
So, why? The speculation of course is that he probably mostly did it just because he hates McConnell and Ryan now, so he's helping the Dems to spite them, and that sounds petty enough for Trump, yes... so it's probably true.
But yeah, it's weird to see Trump do something sort of good, but I guess he did, if not for good reasons.
But otherwise, something quite interesting happened recently: Trump decided to back the Democrats' plan for hurricane relief and increasing the debt limit. The Republicans wanted separate bills for the debt limit and hurricane relief funding, and wanted a long-term debt limit bill that raised it until after the 2018 election, since their base hates raising the debt limit and it's a very difficult bill to pass in the Republican party. The Democrats however wanted a short-term 3 month debt limit bill that also funded hurricane relief, in order to get that done and also get a lot more leverage in December when the debt limit will need to be raised again. They claimed that they would oppose a longer-term debt limit bill, but that is unlikely to be true if it was actually up to a final vote. There is no good reason for Trump to support the Democratic position here, it makes getting major legislation done this year -- such as the tax bill he claims to badly want -- a lot harder. Plus the speculation is that Dems will demand that DACA funding (for the Dreamers) in the debt limit bill that will need to be done in December, too, to keep that program going despite Trump's awful actions on that recently.
So, why? The speculation of course is that he probably mostly did it just because he hates McConnell and Ryan now, so he's helping the Dems to spite them, and that sounds petty enough for Trump, yes... so it's probably true.
But yeah, it's weird to see Trump do something sort of good, but I guess he did, if not for good reasons.