EDITORIAL: Another government shutdown is approaching

The “S” word is floating around the Beltway again. And once more the Democrats and their stenographers in the media are successfully hanging responsibility for a potential government shutdown on the Republicans.

Back in 2013 during the Obama administration, the federal bureaucracy was “shut down” for 16 days. You probably didn’t notice, but never mind. It was the third longest such event in U.S. history, behind shutdowns in 1978 and 1996.

At issue were the debt ceiling, funding for Planned Parenthood, Obamacare and other controversial topics. As might be expected, the GOP — particularly the more fiscally conservative members of the party — took the brunt of the blame. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post accused Republicans of trying to “use the threat of a financial crisis to nullify the results of the last election.”

Flash forward to the present. Funding for the federal government theoretically runs out on Friday. The president wants any new spending plan to include funding for his Mexican border wall. That shouldn’t be any big shock given the issue was the centerpiece of his campaign.

But Democrats have other ideas. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, caught up in the “resistance,” last week called the project “immoral” even though she and many of her colleagues supported a wall just a decade ago. The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said funding for the project is a nonstarter.

In fact, the Democrats are intent on opposing anything Trump. Talk about trying to “nullify the results of the last election.” If it wasn’t border security, it would be some other objection — the furniture in the Oval Office, perhaps? Progressives realize they are bulletproof when it comes the media placing blame for these periodic disputes. What’s the point in compromise?

Even The New York Times admitted this week that “while many are unlikely to say so publicly, some Democrats would plainly relish the political upside of a unified Republican government ushering in Mr. Trump’s 100th day by failing to keep the lights on.”

Blogger Jazz Shaw of Hot Air got it right last week, noting that the media “uproar and outrage” at Republicans was furious back in 2013. “There was no discussion of subtlety or the need for compromise across the aisle during that episode,” he wrote. “The Republicans were to blame and if any poor widows or children missed the arrival of a government check by so much as a day, it would be hung around the collective necks of the congressional minority.”

But today’s narrative has done a 180. “Now that the shoe is on the other foot,” Jazz Shaw observes, “the Democrats are already being framed as ‘heroically resisting’ the president and his hateful, racist, bigoted agenda.”

The new Democratic motto: That was then, this is now.