The Shutdown Question: Madness, Anarchy, or Ideology?

“We had a good day for the anarchists,” Harry Reid said Tuesday morning, when the Senate met briefly to deal with the House’s final, late-night act of legislative vandalism. Twice Monday the House Republicans were sent a bill, approved by the Senate, to keep the government open for about six weeks. The first time, they added a measure to put off much of Obamacare for a year. The second time, the Republicans effectively threw the thing over their shoulders, muttering about maybe sending it to a conference committee. By then midnight had come, the fiscal year had run out, names were being called, and reporters were tweeting about the smell of alcohol. Within hours, there were barricades up around museums and libraries in Washington; eight hundred thousand federal workers had been told to stay home while others got messages saying that they were essential to the preservation of life and property and had to come in—it just wasn’t certain when or if they’d get paid. Is that how anarchists operate, or people who don’t care, or are simply somewhat mad? (If real anarchists were in charge, one of the first federal-government operations to go down—the panda cam at the National Zoo—might have been the only thing left running.) Who are these House Republicans, and what have they done with our government?

Republicans have been speaking of themselves as the victims in all this. “They’ll say it was the mean old Republicans, or the Tea Party, or Fox News,” Mitch McConnell said on the floor of the Senate. “Nero blamed the Christians, the President’s blaming the Republicans,” Ted Poe, of Texas, told Fox News—modern martyrs, innocent of responsibility for the government shutdown they engineered and agitated for, dismayed that the other side would not abandon a historic legislative achievement in return for temporary funding. (Is the one-year delay for six weeks of government supposed to be a general ratio, or is there a bulk discount, say, five years delay to get us through the 2014 midterms?) “They demanded ransom just for doing their job,” President Obama said—pirates calling themselves hostages.

But then the Republicans don’t seem to know who they are any more. A little after seven on Monday evening, there was talk that moderate Republicans were going to stage some sort of revolt on the floor of the House and make their colleagues vote on a “clean” continuing resolution. That effort quickly failed, its patent sanity a guarantor that it couldn’t work in this House. That is not to say that random madmen have escaped en masse from some giant attic and broken into the Capitol (as much as it felt that way last night). Ryan Lizza has pointed out that the members of the “suicide caucus” tend to come from districts that are ideologically and demographically gerrymandered and strongly opposed to the President; they live in bubbles, both at home and in Washington.

There didn’t seem to be serious negotiations Tuesday—instead, the G.O.P. wondered if it could use micro-appropriations to chase away bad shutdown headlines. (Here’s one: children with cancer kept out of clinical trials.) If there were, would the crucial talks be with the Republican Party or within it? Ted Cruz isn’t listening to John McCain or Jeff Flake, both of whom brought to their colleagues’ attention that Obamacare was already law. John Boehner seems to be hoping that people keep asking who’s listening to him—since that question assumes that someone is—rather than wondering if he’s just trying to fake his way through this, until something breaks his way. At one point, Monday night, after getting a phone call from Obama, he did an impression of the President—it involved a little move with his shoulders and a shift of his chin—but was too off his game to pull it off. He just looked brittle.

“They’ve shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans,” President Obama said Tuesday afternoon. The ideology is broader than that, and more complicated than a simple aversion to government in all its forms (there are plenty of forms of spending the G.O.P. will fight for). But it’s a fair description of what’s happening now. The night before, he’d sent out a video message to troops, telling them they’d still get paid; now he was surrounded by people who would benefit from Obamacare. The President mentioned, as he did yesterday, that the shutdown couldn’t stop the new health-care exchanges created by the law from opening, since the Affordable Care Act is funded separately:

    I know it’s strange that one party would make keeping people uninsured the centerpiece of their agenda, but that apparently is what it is. And of course what’s stranger still is that shutting down our government doesn’t accomplish their stated goal.

One got the feeling that Obama would just flash a cellphone with a screenshot of www.healthcare.gov—which went live at midnight, as the panda cam was being turned off—in John Boehner’s face if he could. (Fox News was trying to cheer up its viewers by talking about technical difficulties on the site.)

And the President was already talking about the debt-ceiling fight, which, given the leaden atmosphere Tuesday, may simply converge with the shutdown. “I will not negotiate over Congress’s responsibility to pay bills it’s already racked up. I’m not going to allow anybody to drag the good name of America through the mud just to re-fight a settled election or to extract ideological demands,” Obama said. “That’s not how adults operate.” Even anarchists know that.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Amy Davidson