Morning Joe is making it quite clear to viewers who's to blame for an impending government shutdown -- and it's not Democrats.
Scarborough went off on an extended rant about the remarkable string of 90/10 issues on which his former party is on the 10 percent losing side.
Mika Brzezinski noted that the House passed a four-week extension of funding last night "with the help of the Republicans' hardline Freedom Caucus voting for the measure, but last night, Senate Democrats and a few Republicans stood firm against moving forward without long-term action on immigration, and some other issues."
CHUCK SCHUMER: Democrats and Republicans have been negotiating for months on lifting the caps of defense and domestic spending, on health care issues, on disaster relief. on immigration issues. A bipartisan deal has been reached, I've been part of those negotiations on all these issues. and now is the time to reach it. Not a month from now. The president has been impervious to compromise for several months. He can't maintain a consistent position. We all know that. He makes and then rescinds and then remakes demands. He encourages compromise one day, only to thwart it the next, by saying he'll only accept a deal that gives him 100% of what he wants. That's not what a great deal-maker does.
MITCH MCCONNELL: What our friends on the other side are saying here is, they're prepared to shut down the government, over the issue of illegal immigration. It's a bipartisan interest in solving the DACA problem, but the president has given us until March. Last time I looked, this was January.
LINDSEY GRAHAM: I'm not going to vote for a 30-day continuing resolution. The House said they did their job. How much money did the Defense Department get from the House bill? This is the fourth CR. Every time we have a continuing resolution, it costs the military billions of dollars. I want to fund the military and deal with DACA. We're not going to get one without the other. I'm tired of playing this stupid game. The public hates the way we do business, count me in. This chaos has got to end. I'm willing to keep the government open days, not weeks, to get a deal we should have got a year ago.
"Good for Lindsey Graham, stating the case," Scarborough said.
"He's not going to do yet another short-term fix. Because Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan can't do their jobs and get a long-term fix. And you know another thing we're talking about, there's so many smoking guns. The president bragging last fall about wanting to shut down the government. and also last week, the president of the United States saying, 'You guys go out and make this bipartisan deal. You have the answer, whatever you bring back to me in the interest of bipartisanship, I will sign it.'
"That ended up being a lie. Does he want to shut down the government based on that lie? based on the lie that he told this past fall? Based on what he told Fox & Friends when Barack Obama was the the president of the United States. He's in a horrible position, and the Republicans are in an untenable position yet again."
