Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Shutdown Rite

debt ceiling, budget, government shutdown, shut down

It’s like a fight between siblings: “It’s his fault!” “No, it’s her fault!”

But it is Congress and its two political parties squabbling, and it’s the American voter playing the part of parent. Whose fault is it? Both make plausible cases, sort of, but neither sounds believable. Why can’t these two get along? And where’s my coffee? Where’s my gin?

The subject is the budget.

Not the actual voted-on budget, which though prescribed by the U.S. Constitution hasn’t been seen in quite a while. Congress offers up these makeshifts instead.

“Hours into a government shutdown, the Senate again blocked a pair of rival stopgap bills to fund the government, amid a partisan standoff that shows no signs of easing,” writes Jackson Richman at The Epoch Times. “The federal government shut down Wednesday morning after Congress failed to pass a Republican plan to fund operations through Nov. 21.”

Welcome to Fiscal Year 2026.

Republicans call the failure a “Democrat Shutdown”; Democrats counter with “Trump Shutdown.”

The key concept here is CR — Continuing Resolution, the now-standard budget machinery. Congress must approve funding for federal agencies either through twelve individual appropriations bills or a temporary CR to bridge gaps while negotiating those bills. No full FY2026 appropriations have so far been enacted, and competing CR proposals from Republicans and Democrats both failed in the Senate on September 30, 2025, triggering the lapse under the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits spending without authorization.

Democrats insist on re-authorizing Obamacare subsidies, including healthcare for those in the country illegally — which Rep. Maxine Water (D-Ca.) nearly admits to, insisting upon “healthcare for everybody; we want to save lives.”

Republicans balk at that, their compromise being to regurgitate past CR specs. Which annoys Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky). “Republicans passed a line-by-line continuation of Biden’s last budget, including Doge-identified waste. BUT Democrats refused to vote for Biden’s last budget, thereby shutting down the government.”

Happy New Year!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Bacon

Post author By Redactor
Post date October 2, 2025
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Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Francis Bacon, “Of Studies,” Meditationes sacræ (1597).

Today

Stroke of Luck

On October 2, 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed, preventing him from reacting to the economic downturn following the Great War in a Progressive fashion — making his response de facto laissez faire. One insider, and skeptic of Progressive hubris, archly referred to Wilson’s incapacitation as “a stroke of luck.”

His successor in office, President Warren G. Harding, would go on to massively cut spending as well as taxes, and take on regulation as well. He also released Woodrow Wilson’s domestic war prisoners — ranging from journalists, ordinary folk to socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs — who had dissented from Wilson’s involvement in the war.

The Depression of the early 1920s, though as deep as the early 1930s, proved remarkably brief, thanks to Harding . . . and a stroke of luck.

On October 2, 1789, George Washington sent the proposed Constitutional amendments (the United States’ Constitution’s Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification.

incumbents term limits

Go Ask Gary

A mystery confounds the minds of North Dakota’s legislators.

It has a fake part and a real part.

The fake part itself has two parts: 1) how to learn whether voters support term limits, and 2) how to learn how a legislative body can function unless incumbents, whose advantages over challengers enable them to return to office sporting reelection rates exceeding 90 percent, may remain in place until ousted by death or scandal?

The answer to the first everyone knows. The answer to the second is to write down procedures and give tutorials and guidebooks on how the legislature works to newcomers in legislative halls.

The real mystery, though, is how to overthrow term limits given voters’ massive continuing support?

The answer?

This is where they get “clever”! Their plan appears to be: concoct the fake mystery and set up investigations premised on it.

And maybe sacrifice lambs and the first-born to the gods, hoping and praying and hoping some more that something turns up . . . anything to enable downtrodden entrenched legislators to cling to power for all eternity.

Regardless of popular support for term limits — support, after all, that has been confirmed in polls on the question conducted over the past four decades as well as in election after election.

This all explains why North Dakota legislators are paying $220,000 to Gary Consulting to find out how voters — who in 2022 passed term limits of eight years on the state house and eight years on the state senate — feel about term limits and how lawmakers feel about term limits.

I’ll tell you for free: voters love them; incumbents hate them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Simone Weil

La culture est un instrument manié par des professeurs pour fabriquer des professeurs qui à leur tour fabriqueront des professeurs.

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who, when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, part 2: “Uprootedness,” chapter 1: “Uprootedness in the Towns” (1949).

Thought

Roger Bacon

Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae.

To ask the proper question is half of knowing.
Roger Bacon, as cited in LIFE (September 8, 1958), p. 73.

Today

Model T

On October 1, 1908, Ford produced the first Model T at a plant in Detroit. The auto could travel 40 miles per hour and ran on gasoline or hemp-based fuel. (As oil prices fell, Ford phased out the hemp option.) The Model T was the first car designed for a mass market, rather than as a luxury item. By 1927, Ford had built 15 million Model T cars — the longest production run of any car model until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.

insider corruption political challengers Regulating Protest social media

Revolution Gen Z

It began as online outrage.

Nepal’s government had banned social media, fearing the extremity of sentiment that might be expressed against the regime, but what followed that ban brought down the government. The general mood of protest escalated into nationwide demonstrations, clashes with security forces, and the storming of government buildings, resulting in at least 74 deaths and over 2000 injuries.

But this was not an organized coup. It developed so swiftly from youth protest to the fall of Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s government* that it sure seemed to be spontaneous, taking just a few weeks’ time (or days’, depending where you set the starting point.)

Interestingly, the government the protesters ousted was communist, as in Marxist-Leninist — but both the ruling CPN-UML and the Maoist Centre are less ideologically rigid than traditional Marxist parties, focusing on nationalism, development, and power-sharing rather than the totalitarian push for utopia.

That is, the commies went straight to the corruption part of the long arc of socialism.

And that’s what young people objected to, focusing special ire on “nepo baby” status examples, the scions of wealthy rulers living life extra-large.

But the low employment rates also mattered, as did the censorship of the Internet, upon which so many Nepalese economically depended.

In fact, the momentum of Nepal’s uprising appears to have been largely driven by domestic digital activism on TikTok and Discord.

It’s not called the “Gen Z Revolution” for nothing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Protesters battled security forces on September 8; by the next day the parliament building and other government offices were in flames and the prime minister had resigned. The social media ban was lifted. The army imposed a nationwide curfew on the 10th; Sushila Karki, 73-year-old former Supreme Court Chief Justice became Nepal’s first female prime minister on September 12, 2025.

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Thought

Bacon

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
Francis Bacon, Essex’s Device (1595).

Today

Edison’s Hydro

Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant began operation on September 30, 1882. Dubbed the Vulcan Street Plant, it was established on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, and was housed in the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company building, which burned to the ground in 1891.