Personally, since my passport is current and I don’t plan on visiting any National Parks, I don’t care if most of the government shuts down tomorrow. My strong preference is that the Democrats refuse to fund the government until the Republicans have all missed their Christmas celebrations. That should be their punishment for being what can only be described as “unrelenting dicks.” Just to give you one example of the GOP’s bad behavior, Senate Minority Leader blocked the Senate from voting on the payroll bill that Speaker Boehner passed in the House. Why? Because he didn’t want his members to have to vote on it since it won’t pass and many in his caucus don’t support all of its provisions.
It’s appropriate that Newt Gingrich is in the news a lot lately, because he once thought that the president would get blamed for a government shutdown only to discover that people blamed him. We’ve lived through this before, and all Boehner and McConnell’s tricks aren’t going to help them avoid responsibility.
Their strategy is to claim that they passed a payroll tax holiday and unemployment extension in the House and that Harry Reid is holding up the appropriations bills for political reasons. This argument, they hope, will prevent the people from seeing that their extreme and unpopular efforts to shield and protect the richest 2% of the country from any taxation are the real problem.
I don’t know CNN‘s source for saying that the Democrats are dropping their demand for a surtax on millionaires. No one else is reporting that. If the Dems actually do formally drop that demand, it will help them win the argument over who is to blame for the shutdown, but it will undermine their moral standing with the public. Maybe after the government has been shut down for a little while the Dems can relent on their core demand. Doing it preemptively in exchange for nothing? That would be bad negotiating, and subpar politics.
In any case, I’d expect a Continuing Resolution that lets the bastards go home and spend time with their families. That’s what the White House is asking for at this point. Although, that, too, is part of their pre-shutdown positioning. If the government shuts down, it’s because the Republicans couldn’t even pass a CR.
