The Government Shutdown Countdown Lowdown MEGATHREAD

[Syt]

German media, in their usual knee jerk reaction have asked, "Could this happen in Germany???"

One political scientist, saying "Nope" also explained the history in Germany: apparently Bismarck at one point faced a similar situation when he wanted funds to expand the army, but parliament rejected the budget that contained it. He basically ignored them with the attributed quote, "The government must continue to function" which has become a German state principle.

[The Brain]

German media, in their usual knee jerk reaction have asked, "Could this happen in Germany???"

One political scientist, saying "Nope" also explained the history in Germany: apparently Bismarck at one point faced a similar situation when he wanted funds to expand the army, but parliament rejected the budget that contained it. He basically ignored them with the attributed quote, "The government must continue to function" which has become a German state principle.

The key word is "continue".

[Syt]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/03/marlin-stutzman-government-shutdown_n_4034123.html

House Republicans are continuing to play hardball in negotiations over the spending bill that precipitated the government shutdown on Oct. 1, apparently out of fear that compromise would weaken their power.

"We're not going to be disrespected," Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) told The Washington Examiner. "We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is."

The GOP spent much of Wednesday blaming President Barack Obama and the Democrats for the effects of the shutdown, which led to the furlough of 800,000 workers and the closure of numerous government services. They failed to mention that the spending bill didn't pass because they loaded the bill with restrictions on the Affordable Care Act, a law that passed in 2010 and was found constitutional by the Supreme Court earlier this year.

In an effort to end the shutdown, Democrats are seeking the passage of a "clean" continuing resolution to fund the government while further negotiations on the budget take place. Most, if not all, Democrats would vote for it, and enough Republicans are publicly now on board to pass it.

At the time of this writing, however, such a vote is still being thwarted by the GOP leadership.

[Sheilbh]

I thought Douthat was interesting on this:

Why The Right Fights
To understand how we ended up in this strange political moment, with the federal government shuttered in pursuit of a political goal that most elected Republicans concede is well-nigh-impossible to achieve, it's worth talking not only about polarization and redistricting and the conservative media landscape and anti-Obama sentiment and the weakening of institutional party power, but also about a more basic, often-underappreciated element in how many movement conservatives regard the history of the last forty years. To explain this point, I'll start with a quote from David Frum's great book "Dead Right," which was written in the early 1990s, in what seemed like a period of exhaustion and defeat for limited-government conservatism, just before the 1994 congressional sweep gave that movement new political life. Here's how the Frum of that era — who was much more of a small-government rigorist than he is today — depicted the Reagan years and their implications for the right:

However heady the 1980s may have looked to everyone else, they were for conservatives a testing and disillusioning time. Conservatives owned the executive branch for eight years and had great influence over it for four more; they dominated the Senate for six years; and by the end of the decade they exercised near complete control over the federal judiciary. And yet, every time they reached to undo the work of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — the work they had damned for nearly half a century — they felt the public's wary eyes upon them. They didn't dare, and they realized that they didn't dare. Their moment came and flickered. And as the power of the conservative movement slowly ebbed after 1986, and then roared away in 1992, the conservatives who had lived through that attack of faintheartedness shamefacedly felt that they had better hurry up and find something else to talk about ...

What this passage gets at is the deep, abiding gulf between the widespread conservative idea of what a true Conservative Moment would look like and the mainstream idea of the same. For the American mainstream — moderate and apolitical as well as liberal — the Reagan era really was a kind of conservative answer to the New Deal era: A period when the right's ideas were ascendant, its constituencies empowered, its favored policies pursued. But to many on the right, for the reasons the Frum of "Dead Right" suggested, it was something much more limited and fragmented and incomplete: A period when their side held power, yes, but one in which the framework and assumptions of politics remained essentially left-of-center, because the administrative state was curbed but barely rolled back, and the institutions and programs of New Deal and Great Society liberalism endured more or less intact.

This divide, I think, explains a lot of the mutual incomprehension surrounding size-of-government debates. To liberals and many moderates, it often seems like the right gets what it wants in these arguments and then just gets more extreme, demanding cuts atop cuts, concessions atop concessions, deregulation upon deregulation, tax cuts upon tax cuts. But to many conservatives, the right has never come remotely close to getting what it actually wants, whether in the Reagan era or the Gingrich years or now the age of the Tea Party — because what it wants is an actually smaller government, as opposed to one that just grows somewhat more slowly than liberals and the left would like. And this goal only ends up getting labeled as "extreme" in our debates, conservatives lament, because the right has never succeeded in dislodging certain basic assumptions about government established by F.D.R. and L.B.J. — under which a slower rate of spending growth is a "draconian cut," an era of "small government" is one which in which the state grows immensely in absolute terms but holds steady as a share of G.D.P., and a rich society can never get rich enough to need less welfare spending per capita than it did when it was considerably poorer.

Anyone interested in seeing this argument advanced with particular verve and force should take up William Voegeli's recent book "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State." But no matter how it's been advanced or by whom, it's never carried the day in our politics. The right has had success restraining the federal government's growth and frustrating liberal ambitions for new programs, but when it comes to the question of whether the state should meaningfully shrink its footprint in our society, American political reality really does seem to have a liberal bias. And so the process that Frum described well in the early 1990s has played out repeatedly in our politics: Conservative politicians take power imagining that this time, this time, they will finally tame the New Deal-Great Society Leviathan ... and then they make proposals and advance ideas for doing so, the weight of public opinion tilts against them, and they end up either backpedalling, getting defeated at the polls, or both.

So what you're seeing motivating the House Intransigents today, what's driving their willingness to engage in probably-pointless brinksmanship, is not just anger at a specific Democratic administration, or opposition to a specific program, or disappointment over a single electoral defeat. Rather, it's a revolt against the long term pattern I've just described: Against what these conservatives, and many on the right, see as forty years of failure, in which first Reagan and then Gingrich and now the Tea Party wave have all failed to deliver on the promise of an actual right-wing answer to the big left-wing victories of the 1930s and 1960s — and now, with Obamacare, of Obama's first two years as well.

"They didn't dare," Frum wrote of the Intransigents' Reagan-era predecessors, "and they realized that they didn't dare." Well, this time, no matter the risks and costs and polls, there are small-government conservatives who intend to dare — because only through a kind of wild daring, they believe, can the long-term, post-New Deal disadvantage that the cause of limited government labors under finally be overcome.

And if this attitude sounds more like a foolish romanticism than a prudent, responsible, grounded-in-reality conservatism — well, yes, unfortunately I think it pretty clearly is.

As I say it all seems very Old Labour - no compromise with the electorate.

[Tamas]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/03/marlin-stutzman-government-shutdown_n_4034123.html

House Republicans are continuing to play hardball in negotiations over the spending bill that precipitated the government shutdown on Oct. 1, apparently out of fear that compromise would weaken their power.

"We're not going to be disrespected," Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) told The Washington Examiner. "We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is."

The GOP spent much of Wednesday blaming President Barack Obama and the Democrats for the effects of the shutdown, which led to the furlough of 800,000 workers and the closure of numerous government services. They failed to mention that the spending bill didn't pass because they loaded the bill with restrictions on the Affordable Care Act, a law that passed in 2010 and was found constitutional by the Supreme Court earlier this year.

In an effort to end the shutdown, Democrats are seeking the passage of a "clean" continuing resolution to fund the government while further negotiations on the budget take place. Most, if not all, Democrats would vote for it, and enough Republicans are publicly now on board to pass it.

At the time of this writing, however, such a vote is still being thwarted by the GOP leadership.

[Sheilbh]

That is mind-boggling

I remember, at the last potential shutdown, reading a GOP House veteran who said he thought there would eventually be a shutdown because the new members of the House need to 'get it out of their system'

Does the Hastert rule really work in the American system? It would work in Westminster because the executive and legislature are effectively fused, but it seems problematic in the US.

[garbon]

That is mind-boggling

That a representative from Indiana would say something foolish when asked for a quote?

[Sheilbh]

That is mind-boggling

That a representative from Indiana would say something foolish when asked for a quote?

That any politician would frame it as being about respect and not at least have some platitude ready of what they want to achieve. The House leadership should be circulating at least some basic lines to take.

It's more grim if it's reflective of other congressmen

[garbon]

That is mind-boggling

That a representative from Indiana would say something foolish when asked for a quote?

That any politician would frame it as being about respect and not at least have some platitude ready of what they want to achieve. The House leadership should be circulating at least some basic lines to take.

It's more grim if it's reflective of other congressmen

Perhaps you're just optimistic about congress and following the media's path of drawing to many conclusions from this one rep.

[Ideologue]

God, I wish my party had the will to power of the GOP.  It is admirable, in a way, though they use their strength for evil.

[Tamas]

That is mind-boggling

That a representative from Indiana would say something foolish when asked for a quote?

That any politician would frame it as being about respect and not at least have some platitude ready of what they want to achieve. The House leadership should be circulating at least some basic lines to take.

It's more grim if it's reflective of other congressmen

Yes. They are gambling with a lot of livelihoods and indirectly with the US (and because of that, world) economy. It would be reassuring to think they have at least some idea about why they are doing it for.

[Sheilbh]

Perhaps you're just optimistic about congress and following the media's path of drawing to many conclusions from this one rep.

That's the first time I've seen wanting the leadership trying to impose a single media strategy as 'optimistic'

I've read Boehner wants to try for a grand bargain again - with the debt ceiling. Because getting the CR and the debt ceiling passed are easy so we should throw in social security reform, revenues and, fuck it, let's solve Syria too

[Tamas]

Perhaps you're just optimistic about congress and following the media's path of drawing to many conclusions from this one rep.

That's the first time I've seen wanting the leadership trying to impose a single media strategy as 'optimistic'

I've read Boehner wants to try for a grand bargain again - with the debt ceiling. Because getting the CR and the debt ceiling passed are easy so we should throw in social security reform, revenues and, fuck it, let's solve Syria too

Well they still have their own paychecks coming, so it`s not like pressure is mounting.

[garbon]

That's the first time I've seen wanting the leadership trying to impose a single media strategy as 'optimistic'

That's not what I meant but rather that everyone in congress is a) competent and b) has the ability to stay on script. The inability of one rep to coherently respond doesn't mean that there are no talking points.  I'm pretty sure the McCain campaign put together talking points for Palin.

[Razgovory]

Yeah, most of these people are independently wealthy.