What’s Really At Stake Here
633 words.
This morning I heard an interesting analogy from The 404 podcast for what Republicans are doing with this shutdown. It went something like this (heavily embellished by me): Say two teams play in the Superbowl, and one team wins. But there was a controversial call in the third quarter that led to what turned out to be the winning score. The losing coach is apoplectic. Time passes, and when the next season starts, the losing coach is still trying to force the NFL to overturn the call and give his team the win, and he refuses to let his team play any more games until it’s done. That’s kind of what the House Republicans are doing with Obamacare. (Including our friendly neighborhood 7th District talking robot Eric Cantor.)
Of course, not everybody thinks this is the House Republicans’ fault. Namely, Republicans. And people who live in some kind of bubble. I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around how a person could honestly believe that it’s the Republicans who are bending over backwards trying to negotiate and end the shutdown, while the Democrats and the president refuse to compromise. (I can’t find where I read it, but someone said that delaying Obamacare for one year WAS the compromise - oh here it is, on RedState, of course.) I just can’t see it. It does not compute. It’s an objective fact that Republicans want something that they should not be able to get in this way. It’s as if they are trying to steal someone’s iPod, but the owner of the iPod refuses to give it to them, then the thief complains that the iPod owner isn’t negotiating with him, because he (the thief) is making a big sacrifice by not murdering him to get the iPod!
Blame aside, in my mind, this has nothing to do with whether Obamacare is good, bad, or indifferent. What’s at stake is whether factions in Congress should have the power to circumvent the normal process of making laws so they can enforce their will on the whole country. (Which I just realized is basically what Obama keeps saying, but in this case, he happens to have nailed it. Broken clocks twice a day, yada yada.) It is another objective fact that Obamacare was passed into law by elected representatives of the American people. But okay, let’s say it’s also an objective fact that it has tons of problems (I assume it does, but I have no clue). I feel like we already have a process in place to make changes to defective laws. It’s called introducing new laws and amending old laws and junk like that. Maybe House Republicans should start trying that strategy. Maybe they could start by building a reasonable, defendable case for why Obamacare is a bad idea, something that goes a little beyond the playground logic of “a socialist Democrat administration passed it, so obviously it must be bad.” Maybe they could provide some facts and figures to show that the cost of Obamacare is higher than the cost of a shutdown (yes, it costs money to shut down the government).
(Oh wait, Obamacare was already funded, so the shutdown has no effect on it. So now we have to pay for Obamacare AND the government shutdown.)
On another note, I’m kind of surprised that this thing has gone to a third day. I figured Republicans would let it go for a day or two just to make a point, and then cave in. Now I’m thinking that the longer it goes on, the harder it will be to un-shutdown. Maybe their plan all along was to shut down the government all the way through to the debt ceiling deadline — which will be much worse for the country if we miss it.
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