Dallas Morning News torches nation’s leaders over shutdown: ‘A pathetic moment in American history’

The Dallas Morning News ripped the country’s leaders in a scathing editorial published Friday, calling the partial government shutdown a “pathetic moment in American history.”

The sharp rebuke from the editorial board of Texas’s largest newspaper came just hours after President Trump announced he had agreed to a three-week temporary spending measure that did not include any money for his proposed border wall, prompting the editorial board to write that the shutdown was for nothing.

{mosads}”It is beyond sad that it took the longest shutdown in government history, federal workers heading to food banks, a near meltdown of the nation’s air traffic control system and increasing outrage and condemnation from across the nation to end the standoff between President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats,” the board wrote, adding, “It’s sadder still that it all seems to mean so little.”

The shutdown started on Dec. 22 and lasted for more than a month with congressional Democrats refusing to give into Trump’s demands for more than $5 billion for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“The three-week reopening we got Friday is a paltry truce in a pathetic war, but at this pain point, we are ready to accept any national relief,” the board wrote.

The Morning News lamented the loss of pay felt by the more than 800,000 federal workers impacted by the shutdown.

“We rejoice that these workers will return to paid jobs. In Texas, 6,400 federal employees filed claims for unemployment insurance, according to the Texas Workforce Commission, and more than 600 had begun receiving benefit payments. And there are countless tales of other emotional and financial suffering,” the op-ed reads, calling the federal workers “pawns in this Washington game.”

The board knocked Trump for his proposed wall that is “now whittled to steel slats at strategic points, exists in the deal only as a plaintive plea from the president.”

The editorial also pointed out that the deal Trump agreed to Friday was essentially the same one he shot down back in December when the shutdown began.

“There is nothing to feel good about at the temporary close to this ugly and often childish impasse,” the board wrote. “The plan announced on Friday is close to the approach that Trump had rejected at the end of December.”