Speaker Boehner thumbs up the shutdown his party caused
At Midnight on October 1st, the federal government began to shut down because the Republicans in Congress decided to do it to appease their Tea Party radicals. It’s all big theater and spitting in the eye of the Constitution. They claim it is to stop the Affordable Care Act but is really just a continuation of their plan to gut anything in the government that doesn’t benefit their corporate owners. These are the same guys that got the sequester passed and like common extortionists they are back for more.
The House GOP’s 11th hour gambit prior to a government shutdown Monday night was rejected by Senate Democrats who saw it for what it was: a Republican attempt to use the funding deadline to extract unilateral policy concessions they cannot normally achieve.
As a result, the federal government shut down at midnight for the first time since 1996, furloughing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and closing federal services like national parks and museums until Congress can resolve the budget impasse.
SHUTDOWN: Why Democrats Rejected The GOP’s 11th Hour Conference Gambit
The last minute gambit noted above was appointing conferees to negotiate with the Senate to draft a compromise bill. The problem is for the last seven months the GOP have blocked any attempts to form the conference committee:
The Senate has officially rejected the final ransom demands from House Republicans, demands that weren’t actually intended to keep the government open, but to make the Democratic Senate look bad for refusing to go to conference for a six-week spending bill.
How do you know it’s just about trying to make Democrats look bad? Because since May, every effort of Democrats to appoint budget conferees has been blocked by Republicans. All 18 times the Senate Democrats moved to go to conference with the House on a budget, Republicans objected.
So now Republicans demand a conference after blocking it for past seven months
Now don’t think for a minute that stopping the Affordable Care Act is the only thing the GOP wants. The law was passed, signed by the President, and upheld by the Supreme Court. The exchanges opened today. The Republicans aren’t going to stop it. They tried 46 times to repeal it and have failed and even if a repeal got passed in the Senate, the President would veto it.
The real goal for the shutdown is to gut the government of anything that doesn’t benefit the 1%.
I have a couple of conservative friends who aren’t concerned about the shutdown. They think it is no big deal. Obviously because they went to work this morning unlike thousands of federal workers, but the shutdown is just a continuation of the GOP plan for a smaller government that included passing the sequester – which was a result of extortion back in August 2011.
FOX “news” confirmed this view:
FoxNews.com addressed the effects of a government “slimdown” Tuesday in several articles appearing on its homepage.
The first article listed explains the news website’s terminology preference:
What the Obama administration is portraying as a “shutdown” of the federal government — complete with signs posted at the entrances to government buildings, parks and monuments — is turning out to be more of a “slimdown,” as all but non-essential workers reported to their jobs Tuesday.
FoxNews.com Rebrands Gov’t Shutdown As Gov’t ‘Slimdown’ (PHOTO)
And the cast of ‘FOX & Friends’ were all smiles and giddy this morning and breathlessly told about the shutdown they all had wanted.
Stay Classy GOP!
