Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Before we get to our guest, I got to get something off my chest about Chuck Schumer.

I bet you all do too.

Here's the state of play as we tape this on Friday morning.

The Senate will vote this afternoon to overcome

a filibuster of the House's continuing resolution, which funds the federal government through

September 30th. Schumer announced yesterday that he would support not the bill, but that there's

an assumption that Schumer saying that he will support cloture on this bill will unlock the

requisite number of Democrats, the seven Democrats or eight Democrats, depending on Rand Paul,

that are needed to bring this to the floor. And then presumably Republicans would pass it without

any Democratic votes. Here's the most generous spin on this before I start ranting.

The most generous spin I've heard is that getting into a shutdown makes Trump's Musk's job of dismantling the government easier,

firing people easier, that it wouldn't achieve anything on a policy standpoint, that there was

no real plan to end it, and that, you know, it would both hurt the

government workers and potentially hurt the Democrats' political standing. I want to say,

even if you grant that, right, even if you grant that the end of this process was going to be

some kind of fold, because there was no way to actually stop Musk's reign of terror with only 47 senators.

Even if you acknowledge that, that there wasn't a real endgame for Schumer to stop the horribleness that we are all experiencing.

He still had a political imperative to do everything in his power to fight it in the meantime.

There are a lot of things that Chuck Schumer could have done besides just folding.

He could have held an actual filibuster today on the Senate floor, on behalf of veterans' jobs.

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