There’s shut down and there’s shutdown.

The current contest in Washington is playing out on two levels. One is a game of chicken over government spending priorities as the two political parties shape their messages for next year’s congressional elections.

The government has been shut down temporarily while the two parties spar over the new fiscal year’s budget and play their usual blame game.

The other bout involves a much more brutal scheme by the Trump administration to reshape the structure and role of the federal government and expand presidential power at the expense of the other branches. It calls for shrinking and shuttering a broad array of federal programs and agencies and shrinking the federal bureaucracy while making it more subject to presidential dictates.

And it involves

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