You’ve made your point….. in spades.

Anything more is just grinding his face with the bottom of your shoe.

Ironically, I'm genuinely not trying to grind marco's face at all.

He's not wrong that there's tons of GOP messaging about a $1.5 trillion demand. That's what the Republicans have been trying to tell their base, so that their base will believe the Democrats are being unreasonable.

If any of them stopped to actually think about it, they would quickly realize it was absurd. Even the Inflation Reduction Act could get enough votes from Democrats to hit that topline figure - they were only able to get to $891 billion. This is nearly double that figure. So anyone looking at this should quickly realize that there's no possible way that this could actually be the formal bargaining position of the Democrats.

But since all the GOP folks were messaging that $1.5 trillion figure, it must have come from somewhere. There must have been someone out there - perhaps even a single Democratic congresscritter that didn't think about their messaging - that put out a "wish list" type budget that the GOP must have seized on in order to start spreading this message.

However, I can't find it. Tons of instances where GOP folks are claiming that this proposal was out there, but nothing at all pointing to whatever it was that set them all off. And now I really want to know what it was. I want to know what started this, since apparently this is a thing that conservatives actually believe about the shutdown. Which I didn't know before - I didn't know that conservatives were actually under the impression that Democrats were demanding more from the shutdown than the entire IRA. That's why I like having these conversations - you genuinely learn something from them.

I hoping that marco wasn't repeating all of this out of ignorance but might actually know where the proposal came from. I agree that it's now clear that he has no idea where this figure came from or why he believed it was true - and he seems to think that internet discussions are about "winning," so he can't just come out and say it.