This is a piece I thought was well written, explaining why folks like Chris Cuomo are doing us all a disservice by pretending this is a "both sides" thing when it isn't. CNN of course, trying to appear balanced instead of just reporting it like it is.
The ‘Both Sides’ Brigade Is Encouraging Trump to Take More Hostages...The root cause of the shutdown was not a bipartisan failure of “job performance,” but rather, the president’s decision to deliberately inflict suffering on the American people, as a means of coercing a coequal branch of government into doing his bidding.
That might sound like a partisan jab. But it is plain description of political reality.
The Democratic Party’s position in the shutdown fight can be summarized as follows:
During times of divided government, when two coequal branches cannot reach agreement on an issue, it is not legitimate for one branch to use its technical authority to shutter large swathes of the government as a means of forcing action on its priorities. Thus, the government should be immediately reopened while debate over the president’s border wall continues....
Neutral political reporters do not necessarily have an obligation to take a normative stance on the propriety of procedural radicalism. But when one party in a dispute decides to deploy a hardball tactic, such reporters do have an obligation to accurately describe who has introduced procedural radicalism into the fight, what their rationale is for doing so, and whether that rationale is consistent with verifiable facts.
The evidence that Trump is acting in bad faith is so voluminous and varied, it’s hard to know where to begin. No credible immigration experts — including conservative ones who consider the influx of Central American migrants to be a crisis — believe that a border wall is an effective means of deterring migrants from exercising their legal right to seek asylum in the United States. And the Trump administration hasn’t offered any detailed explanation for how that could possibly be the case. What’s more, if the president’s claims were all true, then his refusal to shutter the government to force action on wall funding during his first two years in office would be inexcusable; however one chooses to describe conditions at the U.S. southern border, they have not radically changed over the last two months. If there is a “crisis” now, then there was a crisis last year.
But the most blatant evidence of Trump’s bad faith might be this: The government shutdown is demonstrably weakening border security, and undermining public safety.
Suffice it to say, one can’t credibly claim that a shutdown is justified because America is suffering from a crisis of border security if a shutdown undermines the security of America’s borders.The objective truth about the shutdown is that the president is deploying an immensely destructive hardball tactic for reasons that are nonsensical at best, and maliciously dishonest at worst.
Chris Cuomo is welcome to argue that Democrats should reward Trump’s use of a tactic that inflicts widespread harm on the populace — and which the president himself cannot coherently justify — because the costs of allowing the shutdown to continue outweigh the moral hazard of incentivizing future abuses of power.
But refusing to assign primary responsibility for the shutdown to Donald Trump does not make the CNN anchor objective; it makes him complicit in the president’s misrule.