I’m going with door #1.

You either delete trolls or answer them. To let his nonsense sit there unanswered will do more damage. Manju-or whoever pays/programs/installs him/her/it-doesn’t just want to trigger responses, [Insert party here] wants to demoralize.

Nil Desperandum.

Remember that back when John Kasich was honest, he and a couple of others got a balanced budget bill brought up by petition in spite of the Speaker.

I don’t see it happening these days. It’s all uniparty.

Not much I can do about it except buy ammunition.

I think it still can have value to respond to manju. It’s not that manju himself will ever change his mind; he is highly highly unlikely to do that. He’s a Democratic talking points machine for the most part. But I sometimes respond to him to make a point for other readers rather than to have his comments go unanswered. People like manju want not just to get responses and rile everyone up (although they do like to do that). They also are happy to NOT get responses, and think their talking points might convince someone or other if those points stand unopposed and unanswered.

Exactly right. He is a robotic paid troll “commenting” here strictly for the purpose of disruption. He has never made an honest comment here and never will.

The problem with using budget reconciliation during the first 2 years of the Trump administration in order to get the wall done was that the GOP margin in the Senate was paper thin. They barely had a majority and would have needed close to every single GOP member of the Senate to vote yes. They almost certainly didn’t have the votes for that.

Now, post election 2018 when the GOP gained a few Senate seats, they almost certainly could pass it in the Senate through reconciliation, because they probably could get a majority. But now they’ve lost the House.

Actually, a lot of people are reporting that if it were voted on right now in the House (funding for the wall, that is), it could get enough Democrats to get a slim majority there. However, Pelosi refuses to bring it up.

Good points but a waste of time on manju. Some leftist commenters seem to me to be either bots or wired into DNC talking points because they all come up with the exact same comment at the same time.

The WaPo and The Atlantic are both vanity projects, Atlantic by Steve Jobs’ widow. There is a shadowy group of billionaires behind a lot that is going on. A commenter at Althouse who calls himself narciso has good links. One last week was to the law firm that runs the Dakota fracking and pipeline demonstrations. Guess who is in all their operations ? Chief Phillips, Marine recon ranger !

Lots of silent webs across the nation.