As Senate Democrats keep voting down the House Republicans’ clean CR to keep the government open — the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, couldn’t even fill a little league baseball field for his YouTube livestream session.
It never drew more than a couple hundred viewers, watching party members ranting and raving over President Trump and the GOP.
Greg Gutfeld gets a bigger audience than Mr. Jeffries.
The round-the-clock telethon had to be ended before it was even halfway over.
Meanwhile, a rival White House feed was peaking at around 100,000 viewers.
Which reminds me, it’s so commonplace that I nearly forgot about it — both Democratic congressional leaders, Senator Chuck Schumer in the upper chamber and Mr. Jeffries in the House, are from Brooklyn, New York.
Unfortunately for them, Brooklyn is not representative of America.
Now, I’m not knocking Brooklyn.
Yet to have both national leaders from a very left-wing leaning blue county in a heavily blue state, seems like the very definition of a narrow-minded out of touch political party.
I mean, the national population is moving to the South and the Sun Belt and the Rockies — not exactly Brooklyn, New York.
Contrast that with the Republicans, where Speaker Mike Johnson is from Louisiana, and the Senate majority leader, John Thune, is from South Dakota.
And oh yes, the GOP party leader, Mr. Trump, used to live in New York — but is now a resident of Florida.
Three red states — versus one dark blue county.
No wonder Mr. Jeffries couldn’t beat Mr. Gutfeld on his YouTube views.
This whole shutdown story is really about Democrats trying to spend a trillion dollars or more on Covid healthcare benefits to salvage the failure of Obamacare — and provide more benefits to illegal immigrants.
This is part of the Democrats’ war against ICE, which is trying to catch and deport the worst criminals from President Biden’s wave of illegals.
Democrats have chosen to defend the illegals and the criminals — rather than ordinary working folks.
Senator Bernie Sanders — who’s from Vermont but was actually born at Brooklyn — says that the Trump presidency is the “worst crisis in America literally since the Civil War.”
But there’s a war going on right now — at Portland, Oregon — as Antifa and other far-left groups continue to violently obstruct law enforcement and attack journalists with impunity.
That sounds more like the Civil War to me than Mr. Trump’s popular law and order crusade.
As for the shutdown, it’s really not much of a shutdown.
Roughly two-thirds of all federal spending, called direct payments for individuals, that totals nearly $5 trillion, is unaffected by the so-called shutdown.
That includes Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security checks, food stamps, veterans’ benefits, and other so-called mandatory spending.
Of the remaining one-third of federal programs, large swaths of personnel are defined as “nonessential.”
And Mr. Trump now has an opportunity to make the nonessential truly nonessential. On a permanent basis.
We’re all waiting for him to pull the trigger.
Larry Kudlow is a columnist for the New York Sun. From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.
