By: Chris Hanrahan
A Second Government Shutdown has been Averted
A follow-up to Shutdown -r which covered the Government Shutdown from the perspective of the past
Next we have to look at the future. And the present. At present the Government has been re-opened, and a bill to fund the Government until October 1st has been passed. At the final hour, a bill was passed, to finally end the 57-day gap in drama-less government funding. You could see it in Nancy and Chuck’s eyes when their government employees weren’t getting their “paychucks”. They were furious! They did not want it to happen again. The truth is, nobody wanted another government shutdown to occur.
In fact, when they discuss the shutdown-that-was, they most often refer to it as the product of a “temper tantrum” had by the president. Well I beg to differ! There’s a lot on the table here in terms of negotiations and making progress, and I’m not sure we want to have branches of the US Government jousting at each other, especially in the era of Twitter and the like.
Any negotiations that were required in order to bring us to this point are only the beginning. Until the Congress is back on track, and the 2020 election is decided, there will be high-strung people with opinions about this stuff everywhere. The best thing to do is head it off, in public, and fuel the debate – with the opinions that you believe in the strongest.
What separates someone who writes, or debates, from someone who consumes the news is simple. It’s the desire for leadership. Many people read news are able to discern certain parts as fake (or #fakenews). But when it is your task to discover and discuss the topic of politics, as a career and as a professional who has skin in the game in some way or another.
What’s Next: This is America, that’s what’s next
Will we build a wall along the Southern Border of The United States? I think we are about to witness the debate become broader than it has before. Some will say this debate will reach from sea-to-shining-sea. There is evidently the basis, in the opinion of some, that we bring everything from our Education system, HUD, the ACA, the DOJ, into this discussion for the purposes of changing the destiny of our Country. When we talk about whether there will be a wall or not be a wall, the conversation will evolve with each coming development. These are news stories, sound-bytes, sometimes facts and sometimes opinions.
I have heard it said quite often that there are experts (ask any expert, they say) who speak about drug trafficking operations. Are these experts who are all-informed? The people who cite the experts don’t really speak much for the experts. Maybe ongoing trafficking investigations/operations aren’t part of what these experts are privy to. I don’t know. They say that experts “agree” as if there’s a consensus and one single voice on the issue that they’re discussing. The issue that they’re apparently in agreement on, is that 99% of the drugs that come into the United States from Mexico come here “through the ports of entry”. If the 99% is really getting in line to come here, then why are we letting those drugs get through?
Also, points of entry exist subterranean, obviously. A look at ending the tunnel networks is paramount to considering the wall “finished”. If the mission objective of the US Military as deployed along the southern border is to end human trafficking, drug trafficking, and illegal immigration across the porous border, then we have to look deep, in some parts of the border area. Tunnels need to be identified, tracked, searched, and remediated. And the public deserves to know when some of this stuff is acted upon. So I hope there is a good media plan for transparency in place, at the White House with regards to the eventual headlines regarding the discovery of tunnels and other methods of subverting existing Customs and Border Patrol resources.
