Please stop, Washington Post. "House approves bill to keep government open as Senate Democrats take heat for threatening to block it"? From whom, exactly, are Senate Democrats taking heat? Polling shows voters will blame Republicans for a shutdown, as well they should, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the White House. And in fact, it’s not just Democrats opposing the bill in the Senate—at least two Republicans do, as well, as the Post article notes.
And yet we get not only that headline but this:
“My Democratic colleagues’ demands on illegal immigration, at the behest of their far-left base, have crowded out all other important business,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday night.
Their far-left base? Apparently—though the Post doesn’t note it—McConnell thinks that 79 percent of Americans, including 64 percent of Republicans, are the Democrats’ far-left base. That’s the level of support a recent Quinnipiac poll found for not just allowing Dreamers to remain in the U.S. but putting them on a path to citizenship. The article refers in passing to polling supporting the Democrats’ position, but not until more than 25 paragraphs later, and not as a contrast to McConnell’s crassly cynical messaging.
One thing the Post doesn’t offer up in an article full of Republicans quoted lamenting the possibility that the Children’s Health Insurance Program won’t be renewed right now? That Republicans could have passed a clean CHIP renewal back in September, but they were holding health care for nine million kids as leverage.
So when the Post says “Senate Democrats take heat,” here’s what it means: The Republicans quoted in that article are attempting to apply heat, and the Washington Post is helping them.