SHUTDOWN SHOWDOWN: Congress Begins Dueling at High Noon Saturday
Of the archetypal heroes of the modern age, none is quite as American as the cowboy, particularly of the era of Civil War reconstruction and the discovery of gold in them thar hills.
Ingrained in cowboy culture, perhaps erroneously, or more likely mythically, is the concept of high noon as the time of doing business. And we mean business.
So it may be wholly appropriate that, under the guidance of this brash and unforgiving President who in many ways cowboy’d himself past Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, that congress would be debating the government shutdown at high noon on a Saturday.
The House of Representatives and the Senate have been adjourned until Saturday at noon, indicating a partial government shutdown will take effect tonight at midnight.
Driving the news: The Senate passed a procedural vote Friday evening to take up a short-term spending bill passed by the House. But Republican Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, who were initially against the motion to proceed, said they switched their vote with the understanding that the Senate will not vote again until both chambers of Congress and President Trump can come to a consensus on border wall funding.
While many of these budgetary shutdowns last only a matter of a few days, the President has indicated already that he is willing to stand his ground for whatever amount of time it takes to fund his border wall, even going so far as to predict that the shutdown could last a “very long” time.
