Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

“America Held Hostage” – Tea Party Anarchists Vote to Shut Down U. S. Government

Tags:



Republican House of Representatives pulls the pin.

GOP House Passes Bill To Delay Obamacare As Gov’t Shutdown Nears

Saturday [September 28] around midnight, the GOP-led House voted to pass three amendments to the continuing resolution which would repeal Obamacare’s medical device tax (248-174), delay the law by one year (231-192) and make sure U.S. troops are paid (423-0). The stopgap bill would keep the government funded through Dec. 15.

At the last minute, party leaders decided to add a special “conscience clause” delaying for one year an Obamacare rule that non-church employer health plans cover contraception without co-pays for female employees.

A senior Senate Democratic aide said it was “highly unlikely” that the Senate would return on Sunday. The White House also issued a statement on Saturday saying that the president would veto the the GOP’s bill. House Democrats were furious with their Republican colleagues.

The House adjourned until Monday at 10am. No Sunday sessions are planned for either house of Congress.

“America Held Hostage” – Day TP minus 2


The people driving this government hostage-taking aren’t looking for half a loaf, and their tactics can’t be rewarded. Even the Republican leadership seems to realize this. The only question is whether their decision to walk away from Cruz will give them the strength to walk away from the threat of a government shutdown.

Boston Globe: Moment of truth for GOP: Break away from Tea Party

Oh, the Iran-y*!


Appearing in the White House briefing room Friday afternoon, President Obama said he had just spoken with Iranian President Rouhani, everything was on track for the nuclear issue, and the U.N. Security Council had reached a resolution that would ban Syria’s chemical weapons. Who could have imagined that negotiating with the Iranians and the Russians would be a more fruitful experience than working with the U.S. Congress?

With just three days left before the government runs out of money and must shut down, Obama stuck by his refusal to negotiate any of the terms the GOP is putting forward, from defunding Obamacare to avoid the shutdown, to a long list of demands that he said includes cutting taxes for millionaires and rolling back regulations on polluters, or else House Republicans won’t vote in the next few weeks to raise the debt ceiling.

“I’m willing to make a whole bunch of tough decisions,” he said, adding not all of them are ones his party would like, “but I’m not going to do this under the threat of blowing up the entire economy.” He called out the Republicans for “appeasing” the Tea Party on issues that have nothing to do with the deficit. And after the spectacle of Ted Cruz talking for 21 hours, the debate now moves to the House, where more than 40 self-styled Ted Cruzes have so far refused to budge from their hard-line position.

Eleanor Clift: Iran, Yes. Congress, No. Obama Won’t Budge for Hardliners at Home

~

*In 1979, the Iranian government took 52 Americans hostage. President Carter  called the hostages “victims of terrorism and anarchy,” adding that “the United States will not yield to blackmail.” Ted Koppel and ABC News started a nightly feature “America Held Hostage” including the number of days the hostages had been imprisoned. The standoff lasted 444 days. On September 28, 2013, GOP anarchists took 316 million Americans hostage. On November 4, 2014, 499 days from Tuesday, October 1, 2013, we can vote the hostage takers out of office and free the American people. And on January 4, 2015, 463 days from today, the United States government will again be free to … govern.

(Crossposted from Views from North Central Blogistan)


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 52 Comments

52 comments

  2. JanF

    So the uniformed military get paychecks but the 400,000 Defense Department workers who cut those paychecks … and provide support for those military members … get sent home?

    And their families lose food stamps and the house they were getting ready to close on … they can’t now because that agency is shut down? And that helps them how, exactly?

  3. princesspat

    On debt ceiling, House Republicans try government by extortion

    By utilizing the dual threats of a government shutdown and a default on the debts owed by the United States, House Republicans have moved far beyond traditional political horsetrading and into the realm of government by extortion.

    ~snip~

    Like a bunch of old-time Bolsheviks or modern-day suicide bombers, House Republicans are perfectly willing to wreak havoc to get what they demand.

    His cartoons are always good, and the fine print says that this one was drawn in 2009. Yet it is still today’s news ::sigh::

  5. JanF

    NOT The Onion: Cruz: I Hope Reid Backs Away From Shutdown Ledge


    Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) sought Sunday to lay the blame on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) if the government shuts down Tuesday.

    “His position is 100 percent of Obamacare must be funded in all instances and other than that, he’s going to shut the government down,” Cruz said on Meet The Press. “I hope he back away from that ledge that he’s pushing us toward.”

  7. JanF

    Your False-Equivalence Guide to the Days Ahead

    As a matter of substance, constant-shutdown, permanent-emergency governance is so destructive that no other serious country engages in or could tolerate it. The United States can afford it only because we are — still — so rich, with so much margin for waste and error.

    He points out that this fight is unprecedented, or at least not seen for the last 150 years:

    … the fight that matters is within the Republican party, and that fight is over whether compromise itself is legitimate. Outsiders to this struggle — the president and his administration, Democratic legislators as a group, voters or “opinion leaders” outside the generally safe districts that elected the new House majority — have essentially no leverage over the outcome. I can’t recall any situation like this in my own experience, and the only even-approximate historic parallel (with obvious differences) is the inability of Northern/free-state opinion to affect the debate within the slave-state South from the 1840s onward.

    On the press:

    As a matter of journalism, any story that presents the disagreements as a “standoff,” a “showdown,” a “failure of leadership,” a sign of “partisan gridlock,” or any of the other usual terms for political disagreement, represents a failure of journalism and an inability to see or describe what is going on. […]

    This isn’t “gridlock.” It is a ferocious struggle within one party, between its traditionalists and its radical factions, with results that unfortunately can harm all the rest of us…

    Excellent analysis.

  8. Portlaw

    feeling about this. There will lots of finger pointing if the government shuts down. After a few days somebody will blink. I am not sure who that blinker will be.

  9. DTOzone

    to a private school on Long Island after he moved back from England in 1993.

    The school was 100 percent white. A few years later, they let a black kid in, because his parents were willing to pay the tuition.

    At the time my mother was President of the Home School Association, what the PTA was called. During a meeting, 30 parents showed up and shouted at her and the principal for letting the black kid in the school.

    It got to a point where several parents actually sought the get the Diocese of Rockville Centre to shut the school down simply because it let in a black kid. In New York, in 1993. They spread rumors about the school to get other families to not send their kids there, that there were drugs, underage sex, even abusive teachers. They boycotted parish fundraisers. Did everything they could to torpedo the school.

    The problem is the local public school was slightly more diverse, with about a 30 percent black population and white parents didn’t want to send their kids there, so they picked the private school since there was no black kids. When there were, they revolted.

    “We didn’t leave the city so they could take over here!” I remember one parent screaming.

    The ruckus died down once they expelled the kid for blowing raspberries in class. Something us white boys barely ever got yelled at for doing.

    This is the same mentality I see with the Tea Party right now. They are no longer guaranteed power and exclusivity over the “others” so now they have to destroy it. It’s selfish, it’s petty, it’s spiteful, it’s completely what I expected them to do.

    The only way to stop them is to beat them and that seems unlikely.

    PS, that school on Long Island, still has no black kids. But my sister thankfully went to public school the next year and my mom didn’t send my little brother there.  

  10. princesspat

    Rebels Without a Clue

    O.K., a temporary government shutdown – which became almost inevitable after Sunday’s House vote to provide government funding only on unacceptable conditions – wouldn’t be the end of the world. But a U.S. government default, which will happen unless Congress raises the debt ceiling soon, might cause financial catastrophe. Unfortunately, many Republicans either don’t understand this or don’t care.

    ~snip~

    No sane political system would run this kind of risk. But we don’t have a sane political system; we have a system in which a substantial number of Republicans believe that they can force President Obama to cancel health reform by threatening a government shutdown, a debt default, or both, and in which Republican leaders who know better are afraid to level with the party’s delusional wing. For they are delusional, about both the economics and the politics.

    ~snip~

    This all sounds crazy, because it is. But the craziness, ultimately, resides not in the situation but in the minds of our politicians and the people who vote for them. Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

    His last sentence makes me weary…..how long will voters continue to support politicians who are so ideologically delusional.  ::sigh::

  11. JanF

    Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) just repeated what Rep. Labrador (R-ID) said on Sunday:

    “I’ve never have been an advocate for a government shutdown and, frankly, for the record neither is our party,” Cole said. “We’ve said repeatedly we do not want to shut down the government. And actually every bill that we’ve put on the floor has kept the government going. So it’s actually the Democrats in a sense that are more anxious or willing to go there. Now politically I think that could well to their advantage.“

    (said with a sorrowful look)

    See, Democrats would “gain an advantage” by forcing the Republicans to take responsibility for the results of their votes. And that is the only possible reason why Democrats are digging in their heels … not because the Affordable Care Act is something that has been part of the Democratic Party platform for the last 60 years and that the landmark law will make life better for ordinary Americans.

    Project much, Rep. Cole?

  12. JanF

    Sen. Angus King: Conservatives Who Urge People To Avoid Obamacare Are ‘Guilty Of Murder’

    Some conservatives have urged young uninsured Americans to steer clear of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges, and Sen. Angus King (I-ME) thinks that’s reprehensible.

    “That’s a scandal – those people are guilty of murder in my opinion,” King told Salon on Friday. “Some of those people they persuade are going to end up dying because they don’t have health insurance. For people who do that to other people in the name of some obscure political ideology is one of the grossest violations of our humanity I can think of.

    The Tea Party has no humanity … that is the basic problem.

  14. JanF

    John Boehner doesn’t have to let the Tea Party paralyze whole government

    The New York Times reports this morning that GOP Rep. Charlie Dent, a moderate from Pennsylvania, is working to round up House GOP support for allowing a “clean CR” funding the government, with no Obamacare defunding, to get a vote in the House. The GOP leadership still won’t say whether it will allow this in the end, because it would make conservatives very, very angry, but if this happened it would pass with a lot of Democrats – meaning no government shutdown.

    This would be the fastest way to a resolution. Take up the bill the Senate sent, pass it … and get it to the president by midnight.

    Greg Sargent asked Rep. Dent how many House Republicans would be okay with this and Dent described what he called the “governing wing”:

    “There are at least 180 or 190 members who are part of the governing wing of the House GOP conference,” Dent said. “There are just a few dozen who don’t have the same sense of governance.”

    If they would just join with Democrats and start governing, maybe 70% of the American people would not be saying that we are “on the wrong track”. How many elections will the GOP try the same scorched government tactic of making the government look awful so that they can point to it and say “Look, it’s Obama’s and the Democrats’ fault … return us to power”?

  15. JanF

    Republicans Lose Business Allies As They Push U.S. Toward Shutdown

    1. The Chamber of Commerce: While the Chamber has been a Republican ally on deficit reduction through spending cuts and opposition to the Affordable Care Act, it is not interested in getting there through either a government shutdown or default on federal debt.

    2. The Business Roundtable: The group, which represents some of the country’s largest companies, released a report around the same time as the Chamber’s letter that showed that almost half of major American companies are likely to slow their hiring thanks to fights over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling.

    3. Wall Street: Markets looked jittery on Monday morning and the Dow was down 100 points as the possibility of a shutdown loomed

    The only way the Tea Party gets voted out of office is if they stop getting corporate dollars for their campaigns. Period.  

  17. JanF


    NY TIMES BREAKING NEWS

    Monday, September 30, 2013 5:33 PM EDT

    Obama Criticizes House Republicans

    President Obama castigated House Republicans for failing to perform one of the most basic functions by not providing money for the government. He said a shutdown would harm the economic recovery.

    “The idea of putting the American people’s hard-earned progress at risk is the height of irresponsibility and doesn’t have to happen,” he said. “Let me repeat that: It does not have to happen. All of this is entirely preventable.”

    Mr. Obama urged Republican lawmakers not to make “extraneous and controversial” ideological demands in exchange for keeping the federal government open and said the impact of a shutdown on Tuesday would be harmful to millions of Americans.

    “One faction of one party in one house of congress in one branch of government doesn’t get to shut down the entire government,” Mr. Obama told reporters Monday afternoon at the White House. “You don’t get to extract a ransom for doing your job.”

    The president scolded opponents of the Affordable Care Act for insisting that the law be delayed or rolled back.

    READ MORE http://www.nytimes.com/news/fi…

    “One faction of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government”.

    80 guys who think they are more important the rest of the 322 million people in our country.

  18. Strummerson

    I can’t even feel enthusiastic about benefiting from the political fallout.  Too much damage.  I don’t want the Pres. to cave…he shouldn’t and he won’t.  But I can’t be happy about the other side exposing their irresponsible idiocy.  I’m pulling for them to cave.

    Maybe Obama should come back with “ok, delay the mandate a year and then single payer.”  Or “ok, I’ll delay the mandate, but you come up with $4BN to fund arts education in public elementary schools.”

Comments are closed.