Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) was asked on the MeidasTouch podcast what on earth House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to accomplish by threatening to shut down the federal government just before the election.
It’s a good question. As Politico reported Wednesday, the GOP appears to be in total disarray as MAGA Mike tries to do Donald Trump’s bidding by trying to play shutdown shenanigans with a spending package tied to voter suppression. The bill requires proof of citizenship to vote and, as the Brennan Center for Justice explained, it would prevent millions of citizens from voting. “The current protections against noncitizen voting are effective: ballots cast by noncitizens are vanishingly rare,” the Brennan Center noted.
So why the heck are Trump and puppet Johnson working to shut down the government on the eve of an election in which Kamala Harris and Congressional Democrats are surging in the polls and Donald Trump just lost a crucial debate?
“Yeah, it’s a total mess,” Moskowitz said. “They have no plan. Or, I should say, actually, they have concepts of a plan, but there’s no path.”
“I had actually thought to myself, if the debate went really well for Donald, they wouldn't want to rock the boat. But now that this debate went very poorly, they may want to kind of shock the system and change the narrative,” Moskowitz continued. He suggested that Johnson should start negotiating with the Democrats, who have been “the adults in the room” all along.
But “Donald Trump is the one who's going to tell Speaker Johnson what to do or not do,” Moskowitz added “And so, you know, we've got a stable genius not only running for president, but also now controlling the House of Representatives. And they really don't know what they're going to do yet.”
Moskowitz said he doesn’t know what the Republicans’ end game is. Maybe it's “to shut the government down, hurt the economy, and then prices will fall on sofas,” he quipped.