In May of last year, President Donald Trump said "our country needs a shutdown." Over the weekend he got his wish. After a tumultuous couple of weeks in which the president said he would agree to a clean DACA bill "of love" and then ranted about not wanting any more immigration from "shithole" countries, the Republican House majority voted for a stopgap spending measure to keep the government funded. But the Republican Senate couldn't muster more than 51 votes and it needed 60.

As I write this, all non-essential government services are closed and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is promising a vote on DACA if Democrats agree to a stopgap measure lasting until Feb. 8. He has scheduled a vote for noon on Monday. Of course they've been kicking this can down the road for months. McConnell promised the same thing in December and never delivered the DACA vote, but maybe he really means it this time.

The sticking points are a fix for DACA recipients, enhanced border security including the Trumpian border wall, newly introduced draconian restrictions on legal immigration and funding for the Childrens' Health Insurance Program. The DACA issue and the CHIP program basically involve young people and sick children being held as hostages by Republicans to get their extreme immigration policies enacted.

The best description of what the negotiations have been like over the past three days came from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a speech on Saturday when he said working with Trump was "like negotiating with Jell-O." He said Democrats had capitulated on the wall and in return Trump told him he would push for a measure to keep the government open for four or five days so they could hammer out the details. Then:

"Several hours later he called back. He said, 'So, I hear we have a three-week deal.' I said, 'No, Mr. President, no one is even talking about a three-week deal,'" Schumer recounted.

"Then a few hours later they called back again, 'Well we're going to need this, this, this in addition,'" Schumer said. "Things they knew were far, far right and off the table."

Basically, every time the parties reach an actual agreement, the right-wingers demand more.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who foolishly believed he had seduced the president into adopting a moderate stance on the issue, was more or less with Schumer on the character of the negotiations. Graham said on Sunday, "As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we're going nowhere. He's been an outlier for years."

The malevolent Miller, a White House policy adviser, may be an outlier but he's been a pretty successful one. He and his former boss Jeff Sessions (then in the Senate), along with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, were responsible for the failure of the last big push for comprehensive immigration reform back in 2013. Miller seems to be good at currying favor with his xenophobic bosses.

Sessions himself worked tirelessly to ensure the DREAM Act was never passed, which was why DACA was required in the first place. Back in 2010 Sessions made the case that young people who were brought to the U.S. by their parents and were in all respects but paperwork American citizens should be sent back to countries many could not remember. He called the DREAM Act "amnesty" for uneducated, unproductive criminal welfare recipients and said it would cost "hard-working Americans" vast sums of money. That was, of course, a lie, but Sessions managed to get the votes to scuttle the bill.

Trump made that man his attorney general. Immigration is the issue most closely associated with Trump's campaign. His closest advisers on the issue, from Steve Bannon to Miller to chief of staff John Kelly, are hardcore anti-immigration zealots. The president himself blew up the negotiations over the notion that people from "shithole" countries were coming into the United States legally. Why, if we didn't know better you'd think they don't really want a deal at all.

The GOP revealed its true strategy over the weekend with this repugnant message:

The White House tried to distance the president from the ad but the fact that it concludes with the words "I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message," disproves that claim. Trump also tweeted several times that the Democrats have shut down the government because they care more about "illegal immigrants" more than they care about the American people. His secretary of homeland security backed him up:

Benefits for millions of illegal immigrants instead of paying Americans who put their lives at risk daily to protect ours? I don't think so. Most Americans don't either. Fund the government and then negotiate. #endtheshutdown - Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen (@SecNielsen) January 21, 2018

Yes, the polls all say that there is a bipartisan majority in favor of helping the Dreamers. Even many Republican voters aren't so heartless that they think it makes sense to deport 800,000 young people simply because their parents broke the immigration laws when they were small children. Everyone knows that it's the Democrats who are trying to help them. That would explain why party officials and the White House are purposefully conflating Dreamers with criminal gang members in that ad. They have to keep their voters confused and angry.

It's obvious from the Keystone Kops nature of the so-called negotiations that Trump isn't strategizing. His racist id and his desire to get a "win" are being pulled in opposite directions, depending on whom he listens to at any given time. His lack of understanding of the issue or how laws are actually made makes him a hindrance to deal making. But we know what Trump wants. He's said it many times during debates and on the stump during the campaign:

We either have a country, or we don't have a country. We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally. They will go out. Some will come back, the best, through a process. They have to come back legally. They have to come back through a process, and it may not be a very quick process, but I think that's very fair, and very fine.

So yes, I think it's probably true that as president he's being manipulated in the negotiations by the odious Stephen Miller and probably by Kelly and Sessions too. They know what buttons he really likes pushed. And some ambitious Republican hardliners like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and members of the ever-cunning House Freedom Caucus are riding the Trump zeitgeist as well.

The new poor people's campaign should get every ounce of support we can find and generate. I say that without the qualifications and caveats I would usually include, because the Poor People's Campaign is doing something that may not be strictly unprecedented in U.S. history but is certainly extremely rare in recent decades. It's pursuing a worthy noble goal, that of ending poverty, while making ending war a central part of its vision, and doing so voluntarily.

Of course this makes sense given the heritage of Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision for the world.

Of course it makes sense given the major economic drain that military spending is, the preying of recruiters on the poor, the environmental injustice of military base pollution in poor neighborhoods, the militarization of police by the military in poor neighborhoods, the culture of violence that the military promotes, the culture of racism that war propaganda fuels and feeds off, and the incredible wonders that could be done if military money was diverted toward good ends.

Yet, typically, when there's a multi-issue or other-issue coalition or mass effort put together in the United States, it takes a full-court-press of private and public lobbying, badgering, and shaming to get the organizers to slip the word peace in somewhere on page 38, or to allow a peace contingent to march at the back of the parade. It's easy to miss, but I think we ought to recognize, the significance of the Poor People's Campaign taking on war front-and-center and unasked. I might overlook it more than others because of the religious focus of this campaign. I'm not religious and am convinced we'd be better off without religion. But we're very obviously better off with these religious activists.

These are the new poor people's campaign's principles:

We are rooted in a moral analysis based on our deepest religious and constitutional values that demand justice for all. Moral revival is necessary to save the heart and soul of our democracy.

We are committed to lifting up and deepening the leadership of those most affected by systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and ecological devastation and to building unity across lines of division.

We believe in the dismantling of unjust criminalization systems that exploit poor communities and communities of color and the transformation of the "War Economy" into a "Peace Economy" that values all humanity.

We believe that equal protection under the law is non-negotiable.

We believe that people should not live in or die from poverty in the richest nation ever to exist. Blaming the poor and claiming that the United States does not have an abundance of resources to overcome poverty are false narratives used to perpetuate economic exploitation, exclusion, and deep inequality.

We recognize the centrality of systemic racism in maintaining economic oppression must be named, detailed and exposed empirically, morally and spiritually. Poverty and economic equality cannot be understood apart from a society built on white supremacy.

We aim to shift the distorted moral narrative often promoted by religious extremists in the nation from personal issues like prayer in school, abortion, sexuality, gun rights, property rights to systemic injustices like how our society treats the poor, those on the margins, the least of these, women, children, workers, immigrants and the sick; equality and representation under the law; and the desire for peace, love and harmony within and among nations.

We will build up the power of people and state-based movements to serve as a vehicle for a powerful moral movement in the country and to transform the political, economic and moral structures of our society.

We recognize the need to organize at the state and local level-many of the most regressive policies are being passed at the state level, and these policies will have long and lasting effect, past even executive orders. The movement is not from above but below.

We will do our work in a non-partisan way-no elected officials or candidates get the stage or serve on the State Organizing Committee of the Campaign. This is not about left and right, Democrat or Republican but about right and wrong.

We uphold the need to do a season of sustained nonviolent civil disobedience as a way to break through the tweets and shift the moral narrative. We are demonstrating the power of people coming together across issues and geography and putting our bodies on the line to the issues that are affecting us all.

The Campaign and all its Participants and Endorsers embrace nonviolence. Violent tactics or actions will not be tolerated.

I've bolded that last sentence because of its importance and rarity, even if it seems separable from the agenda of ending war. I think it's intimately connected.

At World Beyond War we maintain that one of the key reasons to end war is that war impoverishes us:

Direct Expenses:

War has a huge direct financial cost, the vast majority of which is in funds spent on the preparation for war - or what's thought of as ordinary, non-war military spending. Very roughly, the world spends $2 trillion every year on militarism, of which the United States spends about half, or $1 trillion. This U.S. spending also accounts for roughly half of the U.S. government's discretionary budget each year and is distributed through several departments and agencies. Much of the rest of world spending is by members of NATO and other allies of the United States, although China ranks second in the world.

Not every well-known measure of military spending accurately conveys the reality. For example, the Global Peace Index (GPI) ranks the United States near the peaceful end of the scale on the factor of military spending. It accomplishes this feat through two tricks. First, the GPI lumps the majority of the world's nations all the way at the extreme peaceful end of the spectrum rather than distributing them evenly.

Second, the GPI treats military spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) or the size of an economy. This suggests that a rich country with a huge military can be more peaceful than a poor country with a small military. This is not just an academic question, as think tanks in Washington urge spending a higher percentage of GDP on the military, exactly as if one should invest more in warfare whenever possible, without waiting for a supposed defensive need.

In contrast to the GPI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) lists the United States as the top military spender in the world, measured in dollars spent. In fact, according to SIPRI, the United States spends as much on war and war preparation as most of the rest of the world combined. The truth may be more dramatic still. SIPRI says U.S. military spending in 2011 was $711 billion. Chris Hellman of the National Priorities Project says it was $1,200 billion, or $1.2 trillion. The difference comes from including military spending found in every department of the government, not just "Defense," but also Homeland Security, State, Energy, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Veterans Administration, interest on war debts, etc. There's no way to do an apples-to-apples comparison to other nations without accurate credible information on each nation's total military spending, but it is extremely safe to assume that no other nation on earth is spending $500 billion more than is listed for it in the SIPRI rankings.

While North Korea almost certainly spends a much higher percentage of its gross domestic product on war preparations than the United States does, it almost certainly spends less than 1 percent what the United States spends.

Indirect Expenses:

Wars can cost even an aggressor nation that fights wars far from its shores twice as much in indirect expenses as in direct expenditures. Economists calculate the U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan have cost, not the $2 trillion spent by the U.S. government, but a total of $6 trillion when indirect expenses are considered, including future care of veterans, interest on debt, impact on fuel costs, lost opportunities, etc. This doesn't include the much greater cost of the increased base military spending that accompanied those wars, or the indirect costs of that spending, or the environmental damage.

The costs to the aggressor, enormous as they are, can be small in comparison to those of the nation attacked. For example, Iraq's society and infrastructure have been destroyed. There is extensive environmental damage, a refugee crisis, and violence lasting well beyond the war. The financial costs of all the buildings and institutions and homes and schools and hospitals and energy systems destroyed is almost immeasurable.

War Spending Drains an Economy:

It is common to think that, because many people have jobs in the war industry, spending on war and preparations for war benefits an economy. In reality, spending those same dollars on peaceful industries, on education, on infrastructure, or even on tax cuts for working people would produce more jobs and in most cases better paying jobs - with enough savings to help everyone make the transition from war work to peace work.

Recent cuts in certain areas to the U.S. military have not produced the economic damage forecast by the weapons companies.

So, in the short term, military spending is worse than nothing economically. In the long term it may be even worse. Military spending does not produce anything of use to people but depletes people's supply of useful goods.

War Spending Increases Inequality:

Military spending diverts public funds into increasingly privatized industries through the least accountable public enterprise and one that is hugely profitable for the owners and directors of the corporations involved. As a result, war spending works to concentrate wealth in a small number of hands, from which a portion of it can be used to corrupt government and further increase or maintain military spending.

War Spending Is Unsustainable, As Is Exploitation it Facilitates:

While war impoverishes the war making nation, can it nonetheless enrich that nation more substantially by facilitating the exploitation of other nations? Not in a manner that can be sustained. The leading war-making nation in the world, the United States, has 5% of the world's population but consumes a quarter to a third of various natural resources. That exploitation would be unfair and undesirable even if sustainable. The fact is that this consumption of resources cannot be sustained. The resources are nonrenewable, and their consumption will ruin the earth's climate and ecosystems before supplies are exhausted. Fortunately, greater consumption and destruction does not always equal a superior standard of living. The benefits of peace and international cooperation would be felt even by those learning to consume less. The benefits of local production and sustainable living are immeasurable. And one of the largest ways in which wealthy nations consume the most destructive resources, such as oil, is through the very waging of the wars, not just through a lifestyle supposedly permitted by the wars. What's needed is greater ability to imagine a shift in spending priorities. Green energy and infrastructure would surpass their advocates' wildest fantasies if the funds now invested in war were transferred there. World Beyond War also argues that humanity and the world need $2 trillion a year for better things than war:

It would cost about $30 billion per year to end starvation and hunger around the world. That sounds like a lot of money to you or me. But if we had $2 trillion it wouldn't. And we do.

It would cost about $11 billion per year to provide the world with clean water. Again, that sounds like a lot. Let's round up to $50 billion per year to provide the world with both food and water. Who has that kind of money? We do.

Of course, we in the wealthier parts of the world don't share the money, even among ourselves. Those in need of aid are right here as well as far away.

But imagine if one of the wealthy nations, the United States for example, were to put $500 billion into its own education (meaning "college debt" can begin the process of coming to sound as backward as "human sacrifice"), housing (meaning no more people without homes), infrastructure, and sustainable green energy and agricultural practices. What if, instead of leading the destruction of the natural environment, this country were catching up and helping to lead in the other direction?

(Note that education, like healthcare, is an area where the U.S. government already spends more than enough to make it free but spends it corruptly.)

The potential of green energy would suddenly skyrocket with that sort of unimaginable investment, and the same investment again, year after year. But where would the money come from? $500 billion? Well, if $1 trillion fell from the sky on an annual basis, half of it would still be left. After $50 billion to provide the world with food and water, what if another $450 billion went into providing the world with green energy and infrastructure, topsoil preservation, environmental protection, schools, medicine, programs of cultural exchange, and the study of peace and of nonviolent action?

U.S. foreign aid right now is about $23 billion a year. Taking it up to $100 billion - never mind $523 billion! - would have a number of interesting impacts, including the saving of a great many lives and the prevention of a tremendous amount of suffering. It would also, if one other factor were added, make the nation that did it the most beloved nation on earth. A recent poll of 65 nations found that the United States is far and away the most feared country, the country considered the largest threat to peace in the world. Were the United States responsible for providing schools and medicine and solar panels, the idea of anti-American terrorist groups would be as laughable as anti-Switzerland or anti-Canada terrorist groups, but only if one other factor were added - only if the $1 trillion came from where it really ought to come from.

Ceasing to fund militarism would save a great many lives and halt the counterproductive work of antagonizing the world and generating enemies. But moving even a fraction of that money into useful places would save many times that number of lives and begin generating friendship instead of animosity.

Now, most people in the United States, and many people in a lot of wealthy nations find themselves to be struggling. How can they think about a massive rescue plan for the rest of the world? They shouldn't. They should think about a massive rescue plan for the entire world, including their own corner of it. The United States could end poverty at home and transition to sustainable practices while going great distances toward helping the world do the same, and have money left over. The climate doesn't belong to one part of the earth. We're all in this leaky little boat together. But $1 trillion a year is a truly mammoth amount of money. It's $10 billion 100 times. Very few things are funded with $10 billion, almost nothing with $100 billion. A whole new world opens up if military funding stops. Options include tax cuts for working people and a shift in power to state and local levels. Regardless of the approach, the economy benefits from the removal of military spending. The same spending in other areas, even in tax cuts for working people, creates more jobs and better paying jobs. And there's enough savings to make sure that every worker who needs it is retrained and assisted in making a transition. And then the $1 trillion doubles to $2 trillion if the rest of the world demilitarizes as well.

It sounds like a dream, and surely it must be a dream. Don't we need military spending to protect ourselves and police the planet? We do not. We have other means of protection. The militarism is making us less safe. And the rest of the planet is screaming at the top of its lungs that it would like to cease being policed by a self-appointed and not truly international police force that does more damage than it claims to prevent and leaves ruined nations in its wake after each effort of supposed nation building.

Why do other wealthy nations not find it necessary to spend even 10% of what the United States spends on so-called defense? Well, most of their military spending, like most U.S. military spending serves no defensive purpose. Even if one still believed in military defense, defense means a coast guard and border patrol, anti-aircraft weapons, tools for fighting off a feared invasion, the fear of which would diminish rapidly if nations moved toward departments of actual defense. Weapons in the seas and skies of the world and outerspace are not defensive. Troops permanently stationed in the majority of the world's nations, as U.S. troops are, is not defensive. It's preemptive. It's part of the same logic that leads to aggressive wars aimed at removing possible future threats, real or imaginary.

One need not believe even in the necessity of a scaled back, truly defensive military. Studies of the past century have found that nonviolent tools are more effective in resisting tyranny and oppression. If one nation were to attack another in a demilitarized world, these things should happen: the people of the attacking nation should refuse to take part, the people of the attacked nation should refuse to recognize an invader's authority, people of the world should go to the attacked nation as peace workers and human shields, images and facts of the attack should be made visible everywhere, governments of the world should sanction the government responsible but not its people, those responsible should be tried in international court, and disputes should be brought to international arbitration.

Because war and war preparation is not needed to protect us and is widely acknowledged to generate hostility, thus making us less safe, we can list all of its consequences on the same side of a cost-benefit analysis. There are no benefits that could not be better created without war. The costs are extensive: the killing of large numbers of men, women, and children in what have become very one-sided slaughters, the remaining violence that lasts for years to come, the destruction of the natural environment that can last for millennia, the erosion of civil liberties, the corruption of government, the example of violence taken up by others, the concentration of wealth, the wasting each and every year of $2 trillion.

Here's a dirty little secret: war can be abolished. When dueling was abolished, people didn't keep defensive dueling. Ending war entirely means ending defensive war. But nothing is lost in that bargain, as stronger tools than war have been developed for defensive needs during the 70 years since the last war that many like to claim proves war's capacity for goodness and justness. Isn't it odd that people have to skip back over so many dozens of wars to a radically different epoch to find what they think of as a legitimate example of what has been our top public investment ever since? But this is a different world from the world of World War II. No matter what you make of the decades of decisions that created that crisis, we face very different crises today, we're not likely to face that same type of crisis - especially if we invest in preventing it - and we do we have different tools with which to handle it.

War is not needed in order to maintain our lifestyle, as the saying goes. And wouldn't that be reprehensible if it were true? We imagine that for 5 percent of humanity to go on using 30 percent of the world's resources we need war or the threat of war. But the earth has no shortage of sunlight or wind. Our lifestyles can be improved with less destruction and less consumption. Our energy needs must be met in sustainable ways, or we will destroy ourselves, with or without war. That's what's meant by unsustainable. So, why continue an institution of mass killing in order to prolong the use of exploitative behaviors that will ruin the earth if war doesn't do it first? Why risk the proliferation of nuclear and other catastrophic weapons in order to continue catastrophic impacts on the earth's climate and ecosystems? The fact is that if we are going to adequately address climate change and environmental collapse, we are going to need that $2 trillion that the world invests in war.

War is not a tool for bettering the world. War costs the aggressor nation severely, but those costs are as nothing compared to the damage inflicted on the attacked. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia have suffered, and will go on suffering severely from recent U.S. wars. These wars take large numbers of lives, almost all of them on one side, almost all of them the lives of people who did nothing to the nations attacking them. But, while war costs a great many lives, many times that number of lives could be saved by redirecting a fraction of the enormous pile of money spent on war. For far less than war and war preparation cost us, we could transform our lives at home, and make our country the most beloved on earth by providing aid to others. For what it has cost to wage the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, we could have provided the world with clean water, ended starvation, built countless schools, and created green energy sources and sustainable agriculture practices in much of the globe, including our own homes. What protection would the United States need from a world to which it had given schools and solar energy? And what would the United States choose to do with all of the money left over? Isn't THAT an exciting problem to be faced with?

Do we need war to prevent something worse? There isn't something worse. Wars are not effective tools for preventing larger wars. Wars are not effective at preventing genocides. Rwanda needed a history with less war, and it needed police, it did not need bombs. Nor are those killed by a foreign government any less tragically killed than those killed by their own government. War is the worst thing we've invented. We don't speak of good slavery or just rape or humanitarian child abuse. War is in that category of things that are always evil.

Aren't we stuck with war because we're humans? There are few things we say that about. Not slavery, not blood feuds, not dueling, not waterboarding, not sweatshops, not the death penalty, not nuclear weapons, not child abuse, not cancer, not hunger, not the filibuster or the senate or the electoral college or fundraising phone calls at dinner time. Almost nothing that we dislike do we claim to be permanently stuck with against our will. How many major institutions requiring great funding and the coordinated efforts of huge numbers of people can you think of that we claim to be stuck with forever against our will? Why war?

If we were to create a new institution that required a global investment of some $2 trillion a year, about $1 trillion of that from the United States alone, and if this institution hurt us economically, if it damaged our natural environment severely, if it stripped us of our civil liberties, if it funneled our hard-earned wealth into the hands of a small-number of corrupt profiteers, if it could only function through the participation of large numbers of young people the majority of whom would suffer physically or mentally and who would be made significantly more likely to commit suicide, if merely recruiting these young people and persuading them to take part in our new institution cost us more than it would to provide them with college educations, if this new institution made self-government more difficult, if it made our nation feared and hated abroad, and if its primary function was to kill large numbers of innocent children and grandparents and people of all ages, I can think of a lot of comments we might hear in response to our creation of this marvelous new institution. One of them is not "Gee it's too bad we're stuck with this monstrosity forever." Why in the world would we be stuck with it? We made it. We could unmake it.

Ah, someone might say, but a new creation is different from an institution that has always been with us and always will be. No doubt that's true, but war is actually a new creation. Our species goes back 100,000 to 200,000 years. War goes back only 12,000. And during these 12,000 years, war has been sporadic. Most societies at most times have done without it. "There's always been a war somewhere," people say. Well, there's always not been a war many somewheres. Cultures that have used war have later abandoned it. Others have picked it up. It has not followed resource shortages or population density or capitalism or communism. It has followed cultural acceptance of war. And people who have done without war have not suffered for its absence. There is not a single recorded case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder created by war deprivation. On the contrary, most people suffer severely from participation in war and must be carefully conditioned prior to taking part. Since war ceased to involve hand-to-hand combat, it has been as open to women as to men, and women have begun to take part; it would be just as possible for men to cease taking part.

At this moment the vast majority of people on earth are represented by governments that invest less in war and war preparation than the United States does - significantly less, measured absolutely or as a percentage of nations' economies. And some people are represented by governments that have not waged war in decades or centuries, some by governments that have literally put their military in a museum.

WASHINGTON-One of the most remarkable-and, certainly one of the most benign-phenomena of this doomstruck political weekend here is the fact that, while the united states of stasis existed within the Capitol, there was a lot of activity out around the building and all the way down the National Mall, and it was bipartisan, and it was multi-ideological. There was an ad hoc rally on the Capitol lawn to support the DREAMers that drew a fairly impressive cast of political characters. There was the annual massive March For Life that clogged the wide boulevards with fresh-faced high-school kids in letter jackets, and an appearance via video from the president* of the United States. (How many of the assembled knew who Stormy Daniels was is best left to unfounded speculation.) And, on Saturday, in the eleventh hour of the government shutdown, the women's march took over on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, while various senators scurried around pretending that any solution is likely before next week.

(One of more underrated elements of why things aren't getting done is the fact that it's a weekend. Nothing will really begin to bite until Monday or Tuesday, when the furloughs of government workers really begin, and when the polling on the shutdown starts to spread the miseries generally

"One of the worst things," Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi told the crowd on Saturday, "is that they're hiding behind children." She was referring to the CHIP program, which was thrown into the House continuing resolution pretty much as a talking point against the possibility of the Democrats in the Senate doing what they did, which was to kill the CR by defeating a cloture motion on Friday night. Lost in all the parliamentary sturm und drang was how completely shabby that CR really is. For example, it funds the CHIP program, but it doesn't extend the federal benefits to community health centers, which means the poor kids will have insurance and no place to use it. (This, by the way, is probably why Jon Tester of Montana didn't join people like Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp in breaking party ranks. Those centers are vital to health-care in rural areas.)

The CR's other flaws were ably addressed by Robert Casey, Jr. of Pennsylvania, on the floor of the Senate, when he pointed out that there are a large number of issues pending before the Senate that would not be solved even if the CR passed. For example, there is the Butch Lewis Act, which has nothing at all to do with boxing but, rather, is a bill to protect private pensions from being looted by corporate sharpers. These include pensions earned over a lifetime of back-breaking work by...wait for it...coal miners.

"I heard from the Majority Leader that somehow these kinds of issues that are part of the larger debate are not urgent," Casey told the Senate. "He said the only urgent matter is the government-funding bill. I would agree that is urgent but I would also agree that if you are a retired coal miner or the family of a retired coal miner or a retired truck driver or if you are owed a pension of any kind for all the work you did in your life, your situation is urgent. It is not something we can put off and say, 'Well, why don't you wait for another six months? Wait for a couple more CR's and we will get to you later. The pension issue is as urgent as any other."

Going into the chamber on Saturday, Casey got off a Parthian shot at the president* who has been so absent throughout these proceedings. "He should get to work and take care of his coal miners," Casey said. "I'm going in there to take care of mine."

This basic gulf between the parties also accounts for why the Democrats have been so insistent on including a fix to the DACA problem despite the fact that it's fairly easy for the Republicans to sell that issue shallowly as irrelevant to the funding of the government. First of all, they don't trust this president* on immigration issues at all. Nor have they any good reason to do so. And they therefore look askance at any appeal to get to the DACA issue later. They see a very real possibility that, even if the White House doesn't renege altogether, the issue will get tangled up in a fight over the debt ceiling or god alone knows what else.

That's not even to mention that an estimated 122 DACA beneficiaries per week are losing their protected status right now. If you're one of those people, and you see the shadows that once enshrouded your entire life beginning to gather around it again, this is as urgent an issue as any other. It's a harder sell, but the people most directly involved in it are more than willing to try, and they've been haunting congressional offices for months to do so.

"Undocumented youth have said, 'Enough, we will not be put in the shadows, we will share our stories, we will come together, and we will win,'" said Garisa Martinez, a carpenter's daughter from Dallas who was brought here by her parents when she was an infant. She baby-sat to raise $100 for her application fee to college. "We don't do that by ourselves. We're going to need buddies and people who have our backs."

"They've gone so long without a secure foundation of where they belong," said Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon. "That stress is enormous. They've been growing up in our grade schools and our high schools, and contributing to our communities. For years, they've been coming to my town halls. They've been working to get this resolved for so long. It's time to do it and the only way to do it is to attach it to a bill that gets to the Oval Office. And the Department of Homeland Security has said they need a lot of time to set up rules and so forth, so if you want this resolved in March, you have to get it lined up now."

All day Saturday, they speechified in the Capitol, and they filtered through the hallways, talking about optimism they didn't share and deals on issues that the president* doesn't understand any better than he understands salads. Outside, and all over the country, people marched. That was the state of play with the government closed...perhaps for repairs, perhaps not.
(c) 2018 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.

When I was a girl growing up in Oklahoma, women got abortions. But because those procedures were illegal, many of them ended up with back alley butchers. And we all heard the stories: women who bled to death or died from an infection.

One of my older brothers and I can argue left-right politics all day and all night, but when it comes to reproductive rights, we see it the same way: A woman should make this very personal decision - and the government should stay out of it.

We're in step with most of America. Nearly 70% of all Americans agree that a woman's reproductive decisions should stay between her and her doctor.

On the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I think about what has changed since abortions became legal. Our health care system has pretty much dealt with the safety issue: thanks to Roe v. Wade, abortion is now safer than getting your tonsils out. A lot of women are alive today because of Roe.

But Roe has had another enormous impact. Access to safe abortion services has changed the economic futures of millions of women.

As any parent knows, starting a family is a big commitment - in part because the decision to have children carries massive economic consequences. The totals are striking: middle-income parents with two kids will spend roughly $13,000 a year to raise a child from birth through age 17. But the cost of car seats and baby strollers is only the tip of the iceberg. Immediately after having children, women experience a measurable decline in take-home pay - a decline that continues throughout their lives and on into retirement.

For a young couple with modest wages and piles of student loan debt, the decision to start or expand a family is a powerful economic issue. For a woman working two jobs with two kids in day care, an unplanned birth can put her entire family at risk. For a student still in high school or working toward her college degree, an unexpected pregnancy can derail her most careful plans for financial independence.

This reality is not limited to American women. A recent analysis conducted across 14 countries found that "socioeconomic concerns" was one of the most commonly-cited reasons for terminating a pregnancy. From Ghana to Turkey, Belgium to Nepal, women reported getting abortions because of "financial problems," a "lack of money," or because they "can't afford a baby" or "leave [their job]" to take care of one. In the United States alone, 40% of women report seeking abortions because they aren't "financially prepared" to have a child.

That's why access to affordable reproductive health services is so important. Today, women pay an average of $480 to have an abortion during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy and pay even more in the second trimester. As states erect more barriers to abortion, women are forced to travel farther, take more time off work and pay higher fees to terminate pregnancies. These financial barriers fall hardest on the three-fourths of abortion patients who are young and have little income.

Abortion rights are under threat across the country, as anti-choice politicians push for policies that restrict women's access to abortion services. And they have an ally in President Trump, who spent his first year in office relentlessly attacking women's reproductive rights. And it's not just abortion rights. Services that would help women prevent unplanned pregnancies, or care for children after having them, are at risk. Affordable health care, accessible contraceptives and other programs that support working women and families are on the line, too.

When making policy about women's bodies, government officials should trust the women whose lives and futures are on the line. Safety and economic security - that's what Roe v. Wade is still all about.

I lived in a world of back alley butchers and wrecked lives. We're not going back - not now, not ever.
(c) 2017 Elizabeth Warren is an US Senator representing Massachusetts.

"You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." ~~~ George W. Bush ~ 25 March, 2001.

Stephen Miller, the administration's latest iteration of Official Screaming Person, flexed his White House muscles last week and made history in all the wrong ways. Everything that has gone down since "Shithole Thursday" -- the collapse of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) negotiations, the real threat of a government shutdown and an eruption of unvarnished racist invective from the president of the United States -- came about because Miller picked up the phone with one priority in mind: Play to the Trump base.

Unspooling this pluperfect fiasco takes some doing. A week ago Tuesday, Donald Trump staged a bit of theater by not being demonstrably incapacitated by incompetence for 90 whole minutes during a meeting with members of Congress on immigration. The White House felt such a performance was necessary after Trump went on Twitter and accused the leader of a volatile nuclear adversary of having a small penis. Editorial pages from sea to shining sea were dusting off the text of the 25th Amendment again, so a good showing with the Congress members was pretty much required.

During the entire Tuesday meeting, Trump was smiling, friendly and coherent. He was open to several legislative proposals offered by Democrats, including one for a clean DACA bill, to which he reacted enthusiastically -- said enthusiasm being later erased "accidentally" from the transcript of the event. The press loved it. That night, most news stations led their evening broadcasts with some permutation of, "Wow, the president didn't humiliate us all today!" It was strange because it wasn't a hot mess... and Stephen Miller hated it, for reasons beyond his own gaudy racism. A deal on the status of the Dreamers would be a quantum-level betrayal of Trump's still-hardcore base of political support. His current 33 percent approval is comparable to George W. Bush's 25 percent approval level near the end of his second godawful term. Those voters are The Last Patrol, the true bitter-enders, and if Trump loses them, well... it's the old joke. What do you call a leader with no followers? Just a guy taking a walk.

In order to save Trump from alienating his base by doing the right thing, Miller called in congressional reinforcements before a Thursday meeting Trump had planned with Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and other members of Congress. Miller's back-up crew -- Freedom Caucusers like Representatives Bob Goodlatte and David Purdue along with hard-line Republican senators like Tom Cotton -- beat feet to the White House and swarmed Trump like maddened wasps before the Durbin meeting began. When they were finished, Tuesday's jovial huckster statesman was gone. The growling muddy-eyed dog was back, baring its yellowed teeth again.

Talk about a turnstile presidency. It has been widely whispered for a while now that Donald Trump often repeats the last thing he heard as if it were his own wisdom. This mess pretty much proves that out. "I'm all for a clean DACA bill." ("No you're not.") "NO I'M NOT."

My wife can verify that as I watched Calm Don at the Tuesday meeting. I pointed at the TV and said, "There's no way he's going to hold it together." He did... for about 48 hours.

The rest is shithole history, drafted by a shithole president who bragged afterward to his shithole friends that calling Haiti and all of Africa "shitholes" would play really well with his base. Shithole shithole shithole! This is journalism now; thanks again, Don. Watching the news anchors try to slither past the word last Thursday night was better than Cats. It's a good thing TV comes without spam filters, or we'd all be watching the test signal.

Negotiations over DACA and the Dreamers collapsed immediately after the Durbin meeting debacle, and now the threat of a federal government shutdown looms at close of business tomorrow. Congressional Democrats are under heavy pressure to staple DACA to any government spending bill, but are hesitant to deploy this oft-attempted Republican "hostage-taking" tactic themselves.

They just might do it, and God I hope they do, because the alternative is a shattering disaster. With families included, DACA covers more than a million people now caught in the middle of yet another xenophobic nationalist uprising, one more true American tradition. If the Dreamers are turned out, anyone who calls this a moral, Christian nation should be summarily ejected into space.

The rampant racist aspect, right there in the umbra of the MLK holiday (which Mike Pence celebrated by turning Roll-Tide crimson in his church pew on Sunday when the pastor denounced his boss), was further exacerbated when reports surfaced about Trump's backhanded reaction to legislative input from the Congressional Black Caucus. "You've got to be joking," he reportedly said. CNN's Jim Acosta opened his evening report that night by calling the president of the United States of America a racist while standing in front of the White House.

Then came the spin. The press office obviously couldn't deny Trump said it -- there were multiple witnesses, and the man bragged to his friends about it afterward -- so of course they tried to deny he said it. When that failed, they backpedaled to, "He didn't call Haiti a shithole country, only all of Africa," before trying out the "He-said-shithouse-not-shithole-so-ha!" defense. It didn't fly, so they were left with, "Well, those countries really are shitholes. The president was just telling the truth. He talks like 'regular people' think!" They went with that, because of course they did, because they thought it would play well with the base, again.

For the record: Haiti bears the burden of having shared the hemisphere with the United States during the Cold War. Every president from Eisenhower to Reagan lent US support to the murderous regimes of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, who used their Tonton Macoute militia to butcher and disappear tens of thousands of people while looting the country. Everything since -- the invasion, the coups -- has been political aftermath from the US's Cold War game of thrones with the USSR.

Also, Tropical Storm Jeanne killed 3,000 people in 2004. In 2008, Tropical Storm Fay along with Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike left 800,000 Haitians in need of humanitarian aid. In 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing an estimated 300,000 people and leaving another 1.6 million people homeless. Another 10,000 died after the quake in a massive cholera outbreak caused when a UN peacekeeping base accidentally poisoned Haiti's main river with cholera-infected wastewater. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew tore apart most of Haiti's remaining infrastructure and killed another 3,000 people. The storms of this last hurricane season only exacerbated the crisis further. Nearly a dozen major storms, one massive earthquake and a cholera epidemic in 14 years would undo any nation of similar size -- especially given the lack of sufficient support from its hemispheric neighbors, most emphatically the United States.

Haiti is a victim of bad luck, but mostly, it's a victim of deliberate policy. So was Ireland, once upon a time, when those who fled British oppression and the Potato Blight were the new scourge of these shores. Most of the immigrants who have come here over the generations were running for their lives from dire circumstances beyond their control. Such is the case today. With a rank racist in the White House, however, all bets are off. This regime tailors public policy and comment to please a dwindling cadre of white voters who still enthusiastically support Trump's pan-directional hate.

This, right here, is what happens when Trump's base is put in the driver's seat. Thanks to Stephen Miller's base-saving phone calls last week, a million innocent people may well have their lives brutally upended with no DACA deal in sight, the despised (by the base) federal government is again on the brink of shutting down and one-sixth of the planet stands racially insulted by a president who works so few hours a day that some think he could qualify for unemployment benefits.

Dear leitender berater fur politische Miller,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your leading our war against the Dreamers, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 03-17-2018. We salute you Herr Miller, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence