Brian Beutler of TPM says it with no reservation:
GOP’s Long-Predicted Comeuppance Has Arrived
I wish I felt as confident in that as he does, but I have to admit his reasoning seems sound to me:
In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it.
But these aren’t normal times. Republicans have refused to negotiate away their budget differences with Democrats, and have instead instructed their appropriators to use the House GOP budget as a blueprint for funding the government beyond September.
Like all recent GOP budgets, this year’s proposes lots of spending on defense and security, at the expense of all other programs. Specifically, it sets the total pool of discretionary dollars at sequestration levels, then funnels money from thinly stretched domestic departments (like Transportation and HUD) to the Pentagon and a few other agencies. But that’s all the budget says. It doesn’t say how to allocate the dollars, nor does it grapple in any way with the possibility that cutting domestic spending so profoundly might be unworkable. It’s an abstraction.
When a party's policy agenda becomes wholly negative... "the policy of the GOP is to prevent President Obama from accomplishing anything whatsoever, especially anything having to do with social programs..." it leads that party to attempt things that rational people would know better than to attempt. My reaction is probably about like that of most long-time Democrats: part of me would love to see the GOP collapse; another part of me is afraid of what happens to the nation if any substantial portion of its government, whether personnel or policy, is irrational. Hope for the best? The best would be for the House GOP to experience a return to rationality, and I fear that will not happen.
They are insane, Steve. They are going to shut down the government, and they don't remember what happened the last time they did it.
ReplyDeleteThe 1% are about to discover that you can't control whackoes, so they may stop funding them when they can't fly, and the military industrial complex finds out that they aren't going to get paid, then all of the Social Security retirees figure out they aren't going to get paid - it is going to be time for torches and pitchforks.
You reap what you sow [if the rain doesn't wash it away...]
Bryan, the Tea Party approach to government seems to be, "That thread came out... let's pull on another one."
DeleteI don't believe our founders ever anticipated a political force within the United States utterly hellbent on the deliberate avoidance of good government, and so nothing in the framework of the Union prevents the thread-pulling approach. These jokers not only can't remember what happened when Newt Gangrene shut down the government; they can't remember what happened last election: "Oh boy oh boy; we lost the presidency and one house of Congress! Let's do that again!"