A short time ago, the New York Times posted an article about the government shutdown:

Pressure Builds on Senate to End Shutdown as Trump Prepares a Visit

Here’s the lede:

President Trump, hours after making a direct televised appeal to the nation, is facing growing uneasiness within his party that threatens to undercut his use of a prolonged government shutdown to pressure Democrats in Congress to pay for his long-promised border wall.

Featured in the article is Senator Lisa Murkowski:

“We can walk and chew gum at the same time here,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, told reporters Tuesday, indicating that she was in favor of the solution that Democrats have proposed: passing a stopgap spending measure for border security while the debate continues, and a longer-term package to fund the rest of the government through September.

In addition to Murkowski, the article also quoted West Virginia’s junior senator:

Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee on Homeland Security, said Tuesday that she could potentially support that approach, as well.

“I mean, I think I could live with that,” Ms. Capito said. She said she expected pressure from federal employees and voters in her state would only mount the longer the impasse drags on. “I’ve expressed more than a few times the frustrations with a government shutdown and how useless it is, so that pressure’s going to build,” she said.

Interesting. I have always thought of Senator Capito as spineless and unwilling to take any risks even if it helped West Virginians. (Last year, I sarcastically called her a “profile in courage” for her votes on the Republican repeal of Obamacare.) Could it be that WV’s junior senator was willing to take a stand without first getting the approval of her party’s higher-ups? I looked for other sources to confirm this and found that she had been interviewed by Metro News’ Hoppy Kerchival earlier today.

On Kerchival’s talk show, Capito discussed both the government closure and immigration. Kerchival asked Capito a number of good questions but I was disappointed that he often let Capito get away with using some of Trump’s more outlandish assertions (17,000 with criminal records) without any pushback. I was even more disappointed with Capito who clearly stood behind all that Trump had said in his speech. Perhaps most importantly, she walked back what she had said to the New York Times telling Kerchival that the Times

kind of messed up what I said.

Yes, it’s the same old Shelley.