The silliness in Washington, D.C. continues. It is times like this that I wish I lived somewhere else.
On the other hand, with a government shutdown, there is less traffic. That alone is worth tolerating the silliness. And if we are fortunate, maybe some of these Democrat bureaucrats will abandon Northern Virginia for their ancestral lands of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
Today I am sharing 2 articles with you. The first article, from The Wall Street Journal, identifies the cause of the shutdown, and the importance of the Republicans not caving into Democrat pressure. The second article is from The Washington Times, where columnist Don Feder discusses Democrat rhetoric. Both of these articles are timely, well written, and provide insight to the issues of the day. I hope you find them informative.
The Government Shutdown Stakes for the GOP
Will the party extend pandemic ObamaCare subsidies that enrich health insurers?
As we write this, Washington seems headed toward the ritual melodrama of a government shutdown. But the stakes in this case are about more than political gamesmanship. Democrats are manufacturing a panic over ObamaCare subsidies that will test if Republicans have any stomach to curb runaway entitlements.
Democrats are warning of higher premiums if the GOP doesn’t extend turbocharged ObamaCare subsidies that expire at the end of the year. GOP leaders are already hinting that they are open to negotiating, and some are floating ideas that would give Democrats much of what they want. “I don’t love the policy, OK?” Speaker Mike Johnson said recently. “But I understand the political realities.” Oh, oh.
Mr. Johnson is correct that the subsidies are bad policy, though it would help if Republicans told the public the reasons. The super-charged subsidies first passed in 2021 for a Covid-19 emergency that ended long ago. Democrats juiced the subsidies for everyone, while also opening up the spigot to those earning above 400% of the poverty line.
Democrats set a 2025 expiration date to make the Inflation Reduction Act look less expensive over a 10-year budget window but fully expecting that Congress would extend the subsidies again. No Republican voted for that bill, but now some are too frightened to let the super-subsidies expire.
Despite what you may read, letting them expire wouldn’t gut the Affordable Care Act. Someone at 100% of the poverty line would still on average pay merely $3.45 a week in premiums for the cheapest middle-tier plan, according to Brian Blase of Paragon Health Institute and Trevor Carlsen of the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA). Taxpayers would still pay 98% of the premium.
The cost would run roughly $52 a week for a person at 250% of the poverty line, with taxpayers picking up more than two-thirds of the premium. These are reasonable contributions to a health plan, as most people who get insurance from private employers understand. Nearly three in four ObamaCare enrollees are below this income level.
Making these plans “free” has allowed insurers to get paid for people who may not even know they’re enrolled. Some 40% of those in fully subsidized plans had zero claims in 2024, Paragon and the FGA estimate, a number that can’t be explained merely by healthy people not using their insurance.
Democrats don’t mention that the sweetened subsidies are attracting more Americans to the ObamaCare exchanges from better employer coverage. Messrs. Blase and Carlsen cite Congressional Budget Office data estimating that the expanded subsidies would reduce employment-based coverage by four million people. Do Republicans want to endorse that cost transfer to taxpayers?
Extending the subsidies would cost roughly $450 billion over a decade, even if Congress disguises the cost with another phony expiration date. The Trump Administration is wasting its time cutting a few billion dollars in foreign aid if it acquiesces to a half-a-trillion-dollar transfer to health insurers.
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The GOP in Congress could at least try to talk about giving Americans more and better health insurance choices. The Trump Administration recently announced new rules letting more people purchase a less expensive catastrophic plan on the exchanges, versus only those under age 30 now. It’s a start—not that President Trump ever talks about it.
Republicans fear the politics of healthcare and are nervous about defending their changes to Medicaid in their big budget bill. One certainty: Ratifying ObamaCare subsidies won’t defuse those attacks.
Democrats want to make extension of the subsidies the price for reopening the government. But every
Republican has voted to keep the government open, while Democrats are voting against funding it.
Many Republicans voted for Mr. Trump’s tax bill in June in part because he promised to restrain future spending. Giving Democrats some of their half-a-trillion-dollar subsidy demand would betray that promise.
—The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board (October 1, 2025).
Democrats shout fascist while behaving like Brownshirts
Ugly accusations are getting people killed
Louisiana Gov. Huey Long, Democrat and Depression-era populist, predicted in 1935, “When fascism comes to America, it will come under the guise of anti-fascism.” This prophecy is coming true before our eyes.
This year, Democrats are calling everyone who disagrees with them a Nazi or a fascist while facilitating evil.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz charges that President Trump is “a fascist to his core.” Former Vice President Kamala Harris agrees. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the silver-tongued Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who calls Mr. Trump a “Temu Hitler,” are among the Democrats who have twisted reality to reach the preposterous conclusion that the twice-elected president of the United States is Der Fuhrer.
Not just Mr. Trump but also his supporters are smeared in this ugly fashion.
President Biden warned that “MAGA Republicans” are “a threat to democracy,” during a 2022
Independence Hall extravaganza eerily reminiscent of the 1930s Nuremberg rallies, with its lurid lighting.
Charlie Kirk’s assassin wrote on one of his bullet casings: “Hey fascist! Catch!” Like Kirk, fascists were famous for their eagerness to debate critics.
As a clone of Adolf Hitler, Mr. Trump fails miserably. The president never tried to sabotage the democratic process, unlike Democrats, who worked to keep his name off the ballot in several states in 2024 and used lawfare to keep him off the campaign trail. Mr. Trump doesn’t ignore the courts, unlike his predecessor, who proceeded with student loan forgiveness after the Supreme Court told him it was unconstitutional.
Unlike so many other of our recent presidents, Mr. Trump kept his oath of office by securing the border, after 6.7 million entered illegally under Mr. Biden.
By declaring antifa a major terrorist organization, Mr. Trump is moving decisively against a gang that poses the same threat to America that the brownshirts did to Weimar Germany.
Antifa goons attack police and immigration officials, beat opponents and turn our cities into war zones.
Another leftist insurrection was the 2020 riots (20 dead, $2 billion in property damage), which the president’s critics either ignored or applauded.
The left is following a script that was written in the 1930s, when communists started calling their opponents fascists and presenting themselves as the only alternative to fascism.
In reality, the two ideologies are first cousins. Both reject capitalism for a planned economy. (Not for nothing were the Nazis called the National Socialists.) Each believed the interests of the individual must be subordinated to the collective.
Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, declared: “Everything within the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a liberal icon, admired Il Duce until Mussolini became an ally of Hitler.
Mr. Trump wants to reduce the size and scope of government. He wants less taxes and regulation and more private control of the economy, the very opposite of fascism.
So, the MAGA crowd are Nazis, huh? Nazis who support private ownership of firearms? On coming to power, Hitler confiscated guns from his enemies. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15”) would have made a great Gauleiter.
I’m afraid the left has us dead to rights.
We’re Nazis who want less government, Nazis who believe parents should control their children’s education and Nazis who support Israel and abhor antisemitism. Hitler would have had us expelled from the National Socialist Party.
The Nazis and communists weren’t polar opposites but rather rival gangs that started from the same premises.
Democrats think conservatives are fascists because they don’t understand fascism and never understood us.
We are the true heirs of Democrats such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman. The most visible Democrat in America today is socialist candidate for New York mayor Zohram Mamdani, a Marxist who wants to “globalize the intifada.”
Democrats have become the party of statism, group rights and lawlessness, while conservatives remain true to the principles of the Founding Fathers.
At a memorial for Charlie Kirk, Erika Kirk said she forgave her husband’s killer. Fascists are all about forgiveness.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom says immigration enforcement agents act like the Gestapo. Last week, a gunman shot up a U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas, killing one detainee and wounding two others. Assaults on ICE agents are up more than 1,000% over the same period last year.
If they had any decency, Democrats would stop the insane name-calling. Loose accusations of fascism are getting people killed.
–Don Feder, The Washington Times (September 28, 2025).
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 