Northern New England Saves America From the Government Shutdown

Plus: Israel offers tax breaks to refugees from Mamdani’s New York as Paramount-backed Tucker Carlson lobs new lies

Senator Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, talks on television about her vote to end the government shutdown.

If the government shutdown ends, thank Northern New England.

The shutdown has been delaying and canceling airline flights, stopping paychecks for federal workers, and pausing Supplemental Nutrition funding as Democrats prioritize “fighting” over making the government function and as Republicans try to cut ObamaCare subsidies without having created a political consensus for doing so or a plan for replacing them.

Finally last night the Senate voted, 60-40, to fund the government. The Democrats who broke party discipline to join Republicans and allow the funding to move forward were Cortez Masto of Nevada, Durbin of Illinois, Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Hassan of New Hampshire, Kaine of Virginia, Rosen of Nevada, and Shaheen of New Hampshire. Independent Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats, also voted to move ahead.

New Hampshire is the only state where two Democratic senators both voted to open. Maine borders New Hampshire, so three of the maverick votes came from Northern New England.

Why?

There are a lot of possible explanations. Shaheen has announced her retirement, so she can take the vote without having to worry about facing a primary from far-left extremists of the camp of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani posted to social media, “This ‘deal’ dramatically hikes healthcare premiums and only exacerbates the affordability crisis. It should be rejected, as should any politics willing to compromise on the basic needs of working people.”

There is a 2026 U.S. Senate race in New Hampshire that Republican John E. Sununu has a chance of winning. Scott Brown is also running in the Republican primary. The governor of the state, Kelly Ayotte, is a Republican. An influx of libertarians and of refugees from the Massachusetts millionaire tax are moving the state in the direction of its “live free or die” motto. The Democrats have won the state in the presidential election since 2004, but it was close in 2016.

As for Maine, it’s the longtime summer home of the Republican Bush family; Jonathan Bush is running for governor in 2026, getting a lot less attention from the press than the Nazi-tattoo far-left “The enemy is the billionaires” guy, Graham Platner, who is using Mamdani’s political consultant.

New England also has a lot of political independents and pragmatists who want bipartisan solutions and compromise, not gridlock. It also has plenty of government employees and food stamp recipients who want their funds to flow. There’s a tendency in some quarters to write off the whole Northern U.S. as post-Christian, aging, low-growth, hemorrhaging population and jobs to Florida and Texas. There’s some truth to all of that, but the Constitution gives sparsely populated Maine and New Hampshire as many senators as Florida and Texas. New Hampshire and inland Maine (parts of which are attempting to secede from Maine and join New Hampshire) are the closest thing New England has to a Red or Purple state. To some degree in a democracy the representatives actually represent what the people want, and the people in New Hampshire seem to want the government open, not shut, even at the price of ideological purity. The senators deserve some credit for keeping the region relevant in national politics.

New Hampshire’s outsized role in the presidential nomination process seems perpetually under attack from those who say the state is too rural or too white. But there are some reservoirs of common sense there that are reassuring, and available to draw on at moments like this when compromise does appear warranted.

Meanwhile, Senator Shaheen’s daughter Stefany, who is running for a congressional seat in New Hampshire, is publicly denouncing her own mother’s decision. (A New York Times article claims that “Democrats are universally furious at the eight senators who helped broker the shutdown-ending deal without any concessions, as well as at the party’s leadership over a perception that it failed to stop the deal.”) Stefany is running in a Democratic primary while Jeanne is representing her whole state.

Israel offers tax breaks to refugees from Mamdani’s New York as Tucker Carlson lobs new lies: Israel is seizing on the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York to make a new push to attract immigrants.

“He is going to push his Muslim agendas,” an Israeli reserve brigadier general, Amir Avivi, the founder and chairman of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum, said this morning about Mamdani. “Antisemitism will continue to rise dramatically…what we need to be focusing on is facilitating much much more making aliyah,” he said, using the Hebrew term, “going up,” for immigration to the Jewish state.

Earlier this month Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and its minister of aliyah and integration, Ofir Sofer, rolled out new tax incentives aimed at offering incentives for Jews to move to the Jewish state. Israeli press accounts say the offer for new immigrants is two years of zero income tax, gradually increasing to 10 percent in 2028, 20 percent in 2029, and 30 percent in 2030 on income of up to 1 million shekels a year. “Zero percent tax for new immigrants and returning residents!” Smotrich said in a social media post.

It’s great that the Israelis are thinking about cutting taxes and about lower taxes creating incentives for growth (maybe that Arthur Laffer visit in May 2025 helped). Once the incentives end, the top marginal rate at 50 percent is still high (though lower than New York City if you include the city and state pieces), though it does include some health insurance. Maybe instead of targeted temporary tax cuts for new immigrants below certain income levels, Israel should consider permanent tax cuts for all Israelis with a focus especially on the top marginal rates.

And it’s not just Mamdani pushing the anti-Israel agenda. That pal of Vice President Vance and of Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, Tucker Carlson, put out another video on what he calls the global war on Christianity. Carlson says, “Israel took a very aggressive position on the side of Azerbaijan against the Christians using American tax dollars to do it. So Israel was a participant in this war?..That would mean that... Israelis...were killing Christians in this war with U.S. Tax dollars. I mean, because the Israeli defense sector is supported...billions and billions a year by the United States….I just suppose from an American perspective, it’s like, why are my tax dollars being used to murder Christians around the world?” The Carlson episode is sponsored by Paramount+, which is under control of the supposedly pro-Israel David Ellison who just bought Bari Weiss’s Free Press.

The Armenians and the Azerbaijanis, who are Turkic, have been fighting for decades, and the Turks and Armenians dating to well before Israel even existed. The Israelis have their hands more than full with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis in Yemen, and Mamdani in New York—they don’t have a lot of spare bandwidth or munitions for use on anti-Christian expeditions. Making the primary plotline of the Armenians-Azerbaijani conflict about Israel-as-Christian-killers is just a lie grounded in the same old lies that have characterized anti-Jewish conspiracies for centuries. For Carlson to do this after the whole eruption over Nick Fuentes suggests that Carlson drew the logical lesson when Roberts and Vance denounced Fuentes but not Carlson.

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