Joe Biden and the Democrats are playing this government shutdown game again.
They want to keep spending and they don't want to be checked in any way, despite the rising debt and the continuing annual deficits. I'm not even sure Joe Biden knows the difference between the two concepts, since he keeps confusing them.
But 80-year-old Joe Biden is stuck back in the past when in any fight over a government shutdown, the GOP often got blamed by the public.
Now, Biden claims he cares about not having a government shutdown and that it would be bad.
Yet he isn't doing anything at all to stop it, as we can see when the media questioned White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on the subject Friday.
They don't have any meetings with Congress, and KJP doesn't even know when Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) last spoke. "It's not on us to fix," KJP says.
It's Friday, and Saturday is the deadline. Where's Joe Biden? He reportedly took an early lid for the day at 2:42 p.m. EST. It's very hard to "work" four hours a day, have one or two events in a day, and then be off for vacation most weekends.
Biden also has no events scheduled on Saturday or Sunday. So, he's not even pretending to be busy. He just can't be bothered, despite what he says.
But if Biden thought he could just sit back, grouse about Republicans, and pretend things aren't the fault of the Democrats, CNN's data guru Harry Enten has a big surprise for him. As Enten explained, the plurality of voters would blame Joe Biden and the Democrats for any government shutdown.
I wrote about this in a piece on the WaPo/ABC poll.
Enten went on to explain this is very different from prior shutdowns. Joe Biden, who seems frequently stuck in the past to his detriment, may be stuck in the past on this issue as well, thinking this is not going to adversely affect the Democrats and not understanding what Enten is saying.
He and the Democrats haven't done one thing to curb spending or to compromise with the Republicans. Biden just thinks it's his way or the highway.
If Biden is playing games here, it sounds like it's going to come back and hit him in the fanny, and it would be well-deserved.