Happy government shutdown day!

 

 

It's looking like the best shutdown ever!

The Vought memo orders agencies to identify all programs that depend on discretionary funding (which lapses next week) and don’t align with the president’s priorities. Employees who administer those disfavored programs or projects won’t be furloughed. They will be fired.

For small-government advocates, the beauty of this is its reset potential. When government reopens, the Trump team will hire back the fewest possible statutorily required employees at programs it already wanted to cut. For a starter list, see the more than 45 Mr. Trump’s recent budget asked Congress to eliminate—among them the Economic Development Administration, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Legal Services Corp. And then there’s the Education Department.

The Democrats created Trump

Holman Jenkins, in the Wall Street Journal:

Nancy Pelosi, who said impeachment shouldn’t be a partisan stunt, launched a partisan stunt in 2019 by putting in charge Adam Schiff, whom the country knew as a collusion liar. This was a mistake.

Kamala Harris scrapes the larger mystery in her new memoir. Democrats essentially promoted Mr. Trump as a foil. They thought he was their ticket to enact policies Americans otherwise never would support and even most Democrats in office didn’t support, from unenforced borders to extending Joe Biden’s senile incumbency. This was a mistake.

On Aug. 8, 2016, the New York Times made its signal contribution with a front-page directive to the nation’s press to abandon objectivity and adopt an “oppositional” stance toward the GOP nominee. Has an idea ever proved more shortsighted? The spectacle of press lying over the next three years was the single biggest factor in turning Mr. Trump into the political Hercules he’s become.