Government shutdown

As the countdown towards a possible government shutdown began on Friday, Morning Joe’s pundits were already obsessed by the question of who would be to blame. Co-host Joe Scarborough was particularly set on holding both President Trump and congressional Republicans responsible for any failure to reach a deal on continuing to fund the government beyond midnight.

In a friendly softball interview with Democratic Delaware Senator Chris Coons during her 12:00 p.m. ET hour show on Friday, MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell demanded that Democrats only vote to keep the government open if they extract an immigration deal “written in blood” from Republicans.

Hours ahead of a possible government shutdown, CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta debased his already self-centered act by playing the role of sycophant on Friday morning for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) by tangling with Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney over basic facts about Senate procedure.

CBS This Morning co-host John Dickerson on Friday touted Democratic talking points regarding a government shutdown. Talking to Senator Cory Gardner, Dickerson tried to explain away demanding a DACA fix in return for keeping the government open. He lectured the Republican: "And nothing focuses the mind like a hanging.” 

With the country potentially only hours away from Democrats shutting down the government over their demand for illegal immigrants to be protected from deportation, on Friday’s NBC Today, MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace argued that Republicans would receive “a disproportionate amount of blame.”

As they always do, ABC automatically knew who to blame for the possible federal government shutdown Saturday. ABC's political analyst Matthew Dowd compared the current situation to the Jimmy Carter era, on January 19th's Good Morning America, saying that Democrats had the upper hand with Americans' sympathies, because they didn’t have “control” of Congress or the White House.

MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews likely caused the ears of his viewers to perk up moments into Thursday’s show, twice observing that White House chief of staff John Kelly has come across on immigration like he’s “feeding” Trump “Gerber’s baby food.” Matthews played up a Washington Post claim that Kelly told Democrats that some of Trump’s initial immigration views were “uninformed” before…

“You can get a lot farther with a smile and a gun than you can with just a smile.” This quote has often been attributed to the late Chicago mobster Al Capone, who with his fellow organized crime buddies used extortion as one of their tactics to get what they wanted. Today's modern congressional Democrats have clearly benefited from Capone's example.

Back in 2013, with Democrats controlling the Senate and White House, a study by the Media Research Center determined that the broadcast networks mostly blamed Republicans for that year's government shutdown. In the midst of the shutdown, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (now the Democratic Senate leader) actually went on ABC's This Week on October 6, 2013 to assure host George Stephanopoulos that…

The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham was a guest on the Wednesday edition of FBN’s Risk and Reward and he didn’t hold back in hammering the liberal media’s persistence that President Trump as mentally ill, telling host Liz MacDonald that they’re no more than “crazy” “Democratic Party hacks.”

On Wednesday’s Morning Joe, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski sunk to a new low by promoting an Internet conspiracy theory claiming that White House physician Ronny Jackson lied to reporters on Tuesday when he announced the results of Trump’s physical exam. For his part, Scarborough questioned not only Jackson’s report of Trump’s weight, but also the doctor’s finding that the President…

The journalists at CBS This Morning allowed Senator Cory Booker to smear Trump administration officials with what sounded like a Nazi comparison. The Democrat appeared, Wednesday, to gloat about his theatrical attack on Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and her recounting of whether Donald Trump used a profanity in the Oval Office. 

On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, co-host Joe Scarborough made three separate impassioned pleas to Democrats to use Trump’s “shithole countries” comments as a pretext to seize the moral and political high ground and demand passage of a clean DACA bill. In demanding amnesty for Obama’s “dreamers,” Scarborough called on Democrats to vote for shutting down the government instead of giving any concessions to…

CBS This Morning journalist Major Garrett on Tuesday jumped to blame Donald Trump and Republican “hardliners” for a potential government shutdown. Garrett made little effort to find culpability for the liberal Democrats in the Senate who are demanding a clean DACA bill in return for keeping the government open.