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Politicians just interrupted regularly scheduled programming to bring you a message they’ve been repeating ad nauseum for the last three weeks.

President Trump went first. Sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, he read a watered-down stump speech from a teleprompter. Illegal immigrants and a flood of drugs are streaming across the border, the president said in so many words. The shutdown is the fault of Democrats, he continued, and the solution is some variation of a wall.

Notably lacking? Fireworks.

Trump was presidential in that Trump was unusually low key. He didn’t declare a national emergency, a move which would have thrown Congress and the courts into an immediate crisis. He just repeated the boilerplate language from his campaign.

Democrats offered their rebuttal next, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., standing cadaver-like behind a shared podium. They may haunt the dreams of any child who was unlucky enough to be awake during prime time, but aside from that they didn’t accomplish anything new.

Pelosi said the president was holding the country hostage. Schumer followed up arguing that the president was appealing to fear, not facts, and that Democrats and Republicans agree border security is necessary. They just disagree, Schumer posited, on how to do it.

Pundits promised that this would be a clash of the political titans, a rough-and-tumble exchange of fire worthy of the last two years of hysteria. It was instead a 20-minute dud with all the drama of a “Friends” rerun.

And believe it or not, that is a good thing.

Nothing bad happened tonight, because nothing dramatic went down and nothing changed. Governing from crisis leads to unforeseen outcomes and extra-constitutional actions. Instead, both sides laid out their battle lines after kicking a little dust in prime time.