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DarkSteven -> RE: No worries about the shutdown (10/1/2013 4:37:10 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Arturas
Exactly. I did not think they would go this route, but they represent citizens who want them to do this so they are.
Odd. When I read things, I got a sense of inevitability.
The citizens do not want a shutdown. Period. The only people who favor it, do not do so because it's a shutdown, but as a means to stop/slow Obamacare and/or government spending. It won't slow Obamacare, and the idea of stopping spending not when it occurs, bit when it's time to pay for what's already been bought, is insane. quote:
They are the House of Representatives. They are not simply a right side of the left side, they do hold the purse strings and they are using that power legally.
Absolutely. There is no question that this is in their power. The question is, will it benefit them politically or not? Or, to use an outdated, archaic concept, what benefits the country as a whole? quote:
I myself find this very interesting. Still, the Dems have shutdown the Government in the past and we seem to be OK so I suspect we are going to be better off for this action in the long run or at least come out of this stronger. Of course, the fat lady has not sung yet.
It is neither the Dems nor the GOP that can shut down the government. Rather, it is their refusal to work things out, although I will say that here, the GOP has deliberately provoked this by adding conditions which everyone knows the Dems will not accept.
There are two questions.
1. Will the "shutdown" (actually, a cutting back of services) even be noticed?
2. Who will take the blame/credit for it?
Right now, the Dems are the more reality-driven, pragmatic party and the GOP have been driven by a sense that if they're ideologically pure, reality will follow their wishes. (e.g., the 2012 election where the GOP was predicting a GOP landslide based on Rasmussen and Gallup while the Dems were using every other polling source that showed an Obama win, and the Iraq war, where Bush 43 threw out all the analysis prepared for his father which showed that occupation of Iraq would be a stupid course of action. Meanwhile, Pelosi correctly foresaw that the Bush initiatives would be disasters and, rather than fight them quixotically like Teddy and the Cruzers are doing here, positioned her party to be the party of We're-not-Bush.)
We've seen this movie before and we know how it ends. Gingrich, the architect of the major shutdown we've seen before, has tried to tell his fellow Republicans not to follow this path but they're convinced that their ideological purity will make things different from when Newt was responsible for discrediting a previously very virile GOP House.
Note: In the above, I've referred to the GOP as thought it's a monolith. It's not. The old guard GOP is terrified of what they're in for, and the Tea Party wing, led here by Cruz, is driving this. It bothers me a LOT that Cruz is smart enough to know that he is appealing to the TP wing, not the party as a whole, and his gambit here will serve to further fragment the GOP. He doesn't care. He puts his personal ambition over not only the country, but his party as well.
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