Government Shutdown (US)

That's what it is. I did not miss that you also said you preferred a single payer option.

So your assumption that I thought you were a Republican is wrong.

I don't interpret the article the same way you are. There are two ways to look at it, the extremists caused the shutdown, or the split in the GOP caused the shutdown.

This is what Fallows says (emphasis mine):

He's not saying the GOP fight caused the shutdown, he's saying only the GOP moderates have any power at this point to effect a change.

And that is consistent with what I said that the Democrats actually did compromise 100% on the 45 day 'clean' budget extension. The Democrats were fighting for a budget only a little larger than the R's budget. It modified the sequester cuts. The R's refused and refused to give an inch until the D's just said, OK, and passed a 45 day extension using the exact budget numbers the R's were requiring.

The D's can't just keep paying the hostage takers' ransom. That's not compromise and it's not the right thing to do. So now it's up to the decent R's (there are a few still left) to resolve the shutdown.

 

Quick question for all of you in the know... does the Senate and Congress get paid during this shutdown?

 

I may be wrong here (remember, I grew up in Canada and never studied how the American political system is supposed to work), but as I understand it, the ACA is the law of the land. That means the government (Congress, the Senate, the President, whoever) cannot legally defund it. If it's the law, and it is, the government must fund it. Is that not true? What's the point of a law if Congress can make it ineffective with a spending bill? I would have thought the only way the ACA can be stopped would be to repeal it, and we know that, in spite of the Republicans' 40-plus votes in the House to do so, will never happen so long as there's a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President.

Isn't the attempt by House Republicans to defund the ACA illegal?

 

Yes. Many have said they would donate their pay to charity or return it.

 

Not exactly. According to them, (and this has been an ugly GOP strategy for many years), funding is a separate matter from a law. They have successfully trashed many laws and particularly regulations by simply not funding the law or agency.

You would think a law was a law, but enforcement of said law is another matter and that includes funding for said enforcement.

Back when Bush Jr was elected, an OSHA regulation of workplace safety requiring employers to protect employees from tuberculosis exposure was in the final rule phase, ready to be implemented. You'd think something like that was a no brainer. Bush immediately halted funding implementation of the rule and it simply withered on the vine. This was a President stopping a law he shouldn't have been able to stop. And this kind of maneuvering has been used again and again by the GOP. Maybe someone can dredge up cases of the D's also doing it, but not in the mass quantity the R's have been doing it.

Essentially these guys are doing every sleazy maneuver they can to make their minority preferences the laws of the land. Gerrymandering, (yes I know both parties do that, the GOP has taken it to a new level), voter suppression (look up voter caging on Wiki), taking filibustering to new heights, and funding manipulation.


In this case, however, the R's are trying to get legislation piggy backed on the short term budget bill, so they'd be legally changing the law.

 

Actually, I didn't assume that. I was objecting to your dismissal of my argument simply because it was also claimed by those with whom you disagree.

And my point is that the second approach is illogical. It suggests that if the Republicans were united, there would not have been a shutdown. And I submit that simply isn't true, because for purposes of the votes that were taken in the House, they were united.

And if you read my OP, I never suggested that they should. I said that they had the means at their disposal to force the issue much sooner and avoid a shutdown and they refused to do so. Reid refused to refer to a Conference Committee and Obama hid behind his press secretary.

Actually, it's up to moderate Republicans. Decency has very little to do with it.

 

The ACA established the policy and the framework. Funding requires separate legislation as part of the annual appropriations process. A number of the appropriations involved are for the administration and enforcement of the program (eg. IRS). It would seem logical to go ahead and fund it, but then there are those in Congress who are preparing to argue yet again that we should not increase our debt limit even though failure to do so would mean we would begin to default on loans outstanding.

 

It very well might. But, the big problem is that districts have been gerrymandered into being very safe Republican districts. (I'm not saying that Dems wouldn't gerrymander if given the opportunity.) The problem with this is that THE deciding election then becomes the primary, which is composed of the most rabid voters. The only worry becomes a primary challenge from the Right, so these guys get as right as they can possibly get, and dig in their heels. It becomes advantageous to them to be seen as a no compromise, far-right politician.

Not really. It's a journal of opinion, and was originally considered a more moderate/conservative answer to the more liberal New Yorker.

As far as:

I don't see where Ed said that this was one sided theatrics. He noted that the article did not name the original article with the headline. I agree that it would have been better for him to name it, but the point is that he wasn't trying to prove or disprove a statement within the article itself. He was using it as one example of a headline only -- a headline similar to headlines and talking points that we've all heard ad nauseam.
Do you really dispute that there is a struggle within the Republican party?

 

@chicagoliz - The term "gerrymandering" derives from Elbridge Gerry, a member of the Continental Congress from Massachusetts - long before there were Democrats or Republicans.

In New York, where there are two houses in the state legislature, redistricting for state senate districts is overseen by the state senate, and redistricting for assembly districts is overseen by the state assembly. Lo and behold, the state senate has for decades been Republican and the assembly remains Democratic. It is the nature of competitive electoral politics that each side seeks an inside advantage. Neither party is above the other when it comes to that.

As for your last question to @JJ_Maxx, I certainly don't deny there is a split. But to say that split caused the shutdown is ludicrous. JJ might have overstated things a tad by referring to the quote segment as "one-sided theatrics", but it is clearly an overstatement and clearly, by my reading at least, an attempt to try to absolve Democrats of their responsibility in all of this. And, as the saying goes, that dog just won't hunt.

 

Setting aside the journal as a whole, the piece was written by a former speechwriter for President Carter, so the idea that it goes after one party instead of another isn't surprising.

 

You don't get into a situation like this if the blame is solely on one party.

I mean, come on, the government is shut down and people want to claim that its only the fault of the Republican House? Please. The Democrats have guilt in this too... And neither party is willing to negotiate, it seems. No one has the desire to make things happen unless it's exactly as they want it.

There can be no compromise unless there are people who are willing to actually make the compromise happen. Which apparently there aren't... on either side.

All of the showboating is hilarious though. In a kind of sad way.

 

And while the world debates the rights or wrongs of Obamacare and the shutdown, some of us might wonder what they're really distracting us from....

 

Yes, but the fact that it has been around for a long time and been used by various parties does not mean that it has not become a significant problem now. When I first heard people complaining about this, my initial thought was, yeah, t'was always thus. But it really has become more firmly entrenched and is causing much more harm now than it ever has.

Well, yes, but just saying that you don't like the writer, or dismissing it entirely because the writer is a Liberal or is a Conservative isn't really very helpful. There have to be specific points with which you disagree. When I see a piece written by someone with whom I generally disagree, I can have a certain expectation as to what they might say, or whether I agree (or whether I need to check specific facts they might cite). But if I disagree with it, I state the particular points in the piece that I either can disprove, or disagree with, or cite a different consideration that overwhelms the consideration that the author is making -- that is, the author might make a valid point that some problem will arise from some action. But there might be an additional benefit from the action that is greater in scope than the problem the author points out. Hence, I might say that the reason the author uses for supporting his opinion is not weighty enough for the action he wishes to take.

 

Which is not the same argument as telling me I called you a Republican.

It's not personal. It is what I believe about the GOP talking points memos. I think the TPM is propaganda repeated over and over. It's a lie.

Again, I'm not arguing nor did I read in Fallow's piece that he was saying this. I think you misinterpreted the op ed. He said, nothing the D's do short of paying the hostage takers will change anything. Only the sane Rs that still reside in the House have the power to do anything.

Go back and read the paragraph I posted. See what I bolded. It's why I am reading something different in the same words.

No, this only happened recently. That's what so many people don't understand. The TEA Party radicals wanted to stall until they could use the shutdown as leverage.

What is it about the D's giving the R's the exact budget they wanted, 100% no compromises, that you are missing?

 

I know you are new in this country, but seriously, there is no hidden world domination agenda to be covered up here. These TEA Party guys and gals are died in the wool 'government can do no right' ideologues. They literally hate the fact there is a federal government and they want it gutted. In Ayn Rand style, they believe their hard earned tax dollars are being redistributed to lazy welfare queens. They can't see corporate welfare, some kind of blind spot. They hold up ignorant signs that say, "Keep government hands off my medicare." They believe background checks before a gun is sold means the government is keeping a list and will soon be coming to take their guns.

While they believe world domination is just a matter of the US bombing anyone they feel like, I don't think there are any current plans in their minds.

 

You missed the point, but never mind.

No doubt. However, just because someone else agrees with something the Republicans have said does not make that person automatically wrong. It is part of the current political dysfunction that so many fall into the trap of "the other party is always wrong about everything", which goes hand in hand with "if you are going to be one of us you must agree with everything we say." And it's what makes it so easy for big-moneyed interests to hijack political races with hot-button rhetoric that has little, if anything, to do with the real issues of the day.

Yes, and they needed and got two major assists in the process. One was inaction on the Sequester. By letting the Sequester take the blame for any cuts, Senate leadership was complicit in removing the budget from the debate and set the stage for a showdown over a continuing resolution. The other was avoiding referral to a conference committee, which Harry Reid did in an act of political calculus that was no less cynical than was the act of amending the CR.

It wasn't a budget at all. It was a Continuing Resolution, by definition a stop-gap measure. It represented -zero- policy decisions.

 

A lot of people are unaware that back in 2003, the national GOP Party began a conscious effort to take over the federal government by gerrymandering the D's out of Congress. In 2003 it came to light when 11 Texas State D's fled to New mexico to prevent a quorum. The R majority in the State House redrew the federal Congressional districts to influence the federal election. It was not a census year.

Wiki recap

It was eventually successful and the GOP then began focusing on state elections prior to the 2010 census with the same goal in mind. Most gerrymandering was always used to keep incumbents in office. I don't know about distant history, but in recent history this was a new tactic. And until people in the affected states do something about it, we will continue to be a country run by the minority.

 

@Ed If one of us believes X and the other believes Y, then one side is usually automatically wrong. You can believe that is me, I can believe that is you.

Moving on, since I've said about 3 times now it's a temporary budget, clearly I know that.

You said early on the D's should have worked to get things settled sooner. I say the R's had no intention of working anything out, and purposefully waited for the shutdown. Why, if it was only a matter of needing more time at the conference table, is it not the R's fault for not extending the budget allowing 45 more days of negotiation?

 

If the discussion is about something that is a matter of fact, yes. But policy choices are a lot more complicated than that, and it is this inflexible belief of "I'm right and you're wrong" that makes it so easy to manipulate the electorate. It's also what keeps you from seeing the current situation in a realistic light.

This is the last time I will say this, because this circling is getting tiresome (and probably hideously boring to everyone else): It is the Republicans' fault for waiting for the shutdown, and it is the Democrats' fault for playing into the Republicans' hands. You refuse to see this because you, as noted above, see one side as 100% right and the other side as 100% wrong.

Did Harry Reid refer the matter to a Conference Committee once the senate passed a different version of the CR? No. Did Reid initiate meaningful budget discussions in the Senate any time after January 1 in order to get a real budget and end the Sequester? No.

Did Obama at any time make a speech to the nation urging the same people who voted for him to call or write their representatives and get them moving? No.

If, after all of that, you can't see Democrat culpability, it's because you refuse to see it.

 

So because he's new to this country, you immediately discount his view and shoo him away? Tell him the way you see it, and that he can't possibly be correct? I'm not going to throw my views in the mix because I have no desire to bat the ball around, but that response was way out of line. Why didn't you tell Lemex that he's not from here so stay out of it? Because he didn't push the TEA party button? Why don't you just come right out and call him a crazy conspiracy theorist? That kind of response... unnecessary.

 

Even though my post was just a lighthearted joke, I could see this happening. This thread is a little prickly. I'm not sure I feel comfortable here, especally considering I've decided to not be around the forums as much for the time being. As it happens, what erebh said is no different from what Noam Chomsky has been saying since the 70s.

 

It's always prickly, lol. I've been around, Lemex, and I'm not sure I feel comfortable here either

 

Why don't you ask him about the conspiracy theory he has? He's not made a secret of it.

Nothing automatic about it. I am very familiar with erebh's beliefs about a one world government conspiracy and he referenced it with the comment there was a conspiracy here to have a fake fight because our government was really just trying to distract the masses from some other matter they were hiding from us. I know quite a bit about the politics in this country and there is no there there in erebh's statement.

 

So because he disagrees with you, you just think he's crazy? I don't think he's the one with blinders on, oddly enough, since you're the one that knows so much. But because he talks about what he believes (like you're talking about what you believe) you feel the need to shout him down because it doesn't fall in line with your ability to follow the herd? There's a cliff over there.... careful.

 

@GingerCoffee - no need to apologize, though I thank you for the message. The thing is, you're barking up the wrong tree assuming that I don't agree with him...