Stirewalt: Maybe ‘El Presidente’ Wants to Try Out a Shutdown

EXCERPT:

HEMMER: "Here is my sense from afar. I don’t think anyone wants a government shutdown. Do you hear from either side or factions on either side that would say this would be good for us to shut things down?"
STIREWALT: "I don’t know. I think El Presidente may want one, I am not sure. He -- he seems to be — remember, once he said a good shutdown. He said this last year when the first threats were coming as we — these deadlines, by the way, started in September. So we’ve been doing this since September that we’ve been kicking the can on this stuff. I think the president, who has never been in Washington, never worked in Washington before, maybe he wants to try it out. And by the way, he has considerable power as president to try to mitigate the effects of a shutdown in terms of ordering the government’s obligations and what gets paid first. So, maybe he wants to try it out. I don’t know."