Opinion | Trump’s ‘Forever Shutdown’

I don’t know how this ends, and what I want to say is you can’t have a forever shutdown for very practical reasons. You don’t want every air-traffic controller to quit. You don’t want — you don’t want the properties owned by the federal government to fall into disrepair. Like, there were actual things that have to happen for the country to run. And there is some wiggle room and redundancy over the course of a month, maybe if we’re stretching it two months. But beyond that, it matters that the federal government is operational. It seems to me that the president thinks you can have a forever shutdown, and that in the president’s conception of things, the shutdown gives him more power through some magical, convoluted, transmogrifying mechanism that no one understands. The shutdown means the president is even more powerful. Whatever.