Monday Open Thread [9.30.13]

The National Review on Speaker Boehner’s dilemma:

“That aura of Republican infighting will create an interesting dynamic if Tuesday morning comes without an accord. While Boehner and other leaders will be defending the GOP’s position in front of the cameras, there may be a subtle effort to use the episode — and what many expect to be its disastrous political results — as a means of discrediting the hardliners who give the speaker headaches. Conservatives, meanwhile, will try to show that the tactic is helping focus public attention on Obamacare.”

Said one veteran House Republican: “It may have to shut down. Until people feel the political pain, I doubt we can come together on anything. Boehner knows that, probably more than anyone.”

If Boehner does not allow the Senate’s clean CR to get a vote today, he and his Republican Representatives will be directly and solely responsible for the government shutdown and every single consequence resulting from it. As a result, if those consequences are negative, the Republicans may lose the House in 2014. But at the same time, if Boehner allows the clean CR to come to the floor for a vote, then the only way it passes is with a majority of Democrats and sane Republicans. Boehner has done this before, on the Hurricane Sandy Aid and on the Fiscal Cliff Deal. But if he does it this time, he will lose his Speakership.

So we are going to learn today whether Boehner is a opportunistic coward or a self sacrificing patriot.

A new Morning Consult tracking poll finds that just 7% of voters support delaying or defunding Obamacare. But that is not the biggest news from this poll:

39% of voters want Congress to either let the law take effect or expand the law even further. Another 29% think that Congress should work on making improvements to Obamacare, but ultimately leave the law in place. By a two to one margin, the poll’s respondents said ‘the results from the 2012 presidential election represented a referendum on moving forward with the Affordable Care Act.'”

68% are against repealed or delaying the law. A new CNN poll conducted over the weekend shows that Republicans are insane if they think they will win this. They should capitulate completely to the President and the Senate now, lest they be destroyed.

Do you think the Republicans in Congress have acted mostly like responsible adults or mostly like spoiled children during the recent debate over the federal budget?

Like spoiled children: 69
Like responsible adults: 25

Which do you think is more important for Congress to do:

Avoid a government shutdown: 60
Defund Obamacare: 34

It is going to be fun watching a political party commit suicide on live national television. Pass the popcorn.

Paul Krugman:

[H]ow does this end? The votes to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling are there, and always have been: every Democrat in the House would vote for the necessary measures, and so would enough Republicans. The problem is that G.O.P. leaders, fearing the wrath of the radicals, haven’t been willing to allow such votes. What would change their minds?

Ironically, considering who got us into our economic mess, the most plausible answer is that Wall Street will come to the rescue — that the big money will tell Republican leaders that they have to put an end to the nonsense.

But what if even the plutocrats lack the power to rein in the radicals? In that case, Mr. Obama will either let default happen or find some way of defying the blackmailers, trading a financial crisis for a constitutional crisis.

President Bill Clinton, who has some experience with Republican temper tantrums:

“There’s nothing to negotiate with. He shouldn’t delay the health care bill. It’s the law and we’re opening the enrollment on October 1 [tomorrow]. We’re ready,” Clinton said on This Week. “They’re in better shape now than the country was to implement President Bush’s drug program, which everybody’s forgotten. Go back and look at the polls, even more unpopular than health care reform is now.”

“So I think that’s a non-starter,” Clinton said.

“The circus created the past few days isn’t reflective of mainstream Republicans — it projects an image of not being reasonable. The vast majority of Republicans are pretty level-headed and are here to govern.” — Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), quoted by Bloomberg, on the intraparty struggle playing out in public over a government shutdown. Well, Congressman Grimm (by the way, you are most appropriately named), you have 12 hours to capitulate and vote yes on a clean CR to prove that. If you vote no, you are not mainstream, you are extreme.

Josh Marshall:

For all the ubiquity of political polarizing and heightened partisanship, no honest observer can deny that the rise of crisis governance and various forms of legislative hostage taking comes entirely from the GOP. I hesitate to state it so baldly because inevitably it cuts off the discussion with at least a sizable minority of the political nation. But there’s no way to grapple with the issue without being clear on this single underlying reality.

Stan Collender wonders whether “a government shutdown could be the point that historians one day point to as the beginning of the end for the tea partiers in Congress”:

[G]iven that Gingrich and congressional Republicans were far more popular in the mid-1990s than the tea party is today, and in light of the fact that the tea party and not House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is most likely to bear the blame if a shutdown occurs, there’s a good reason to think that at least some of the [Tea Party’s] supporters will find themselves cursing the tea party’s name very soon, especially when the shutdown begins to affect them negatively.

This group will still agree with the tea party’s goals, just not with its tactics. But the tea party will alienate its more intense supporters if it moderates those tactics. Either way, at least some of its base will be lost.