I'm going to start by establishing a pair of basic premises, which I hold so staggeringly self-evident as to need no defense or articulation: the current government shutdown is bad, and the current government shutdown is the Republican Party's fault. If you disagree with either of these foundation arguments, you're not going to get a lot out of what comes after. You have been warned.
Of course, I could get a lot more specific about the second argument. Instead of blaming the Republican Party, I could blame those 80ish Republican representatives that signed the infamous letter supporting the shutdown ploy, who seem most in tune with the Tea Party zeitgeist. I could blame Sen. Ted Cruz, who whipped them into a frenzy and seems to be the source of their initial deadlock-breaking strategy (fund only those parts of govt. that we like and then look surprised when the Senate laughs in our faces). I could blame John Boehner, who makes the decisions about what gets a vote in the House and therefore has the power at any moment to permit a vote on a 'clean' budget resolution. He has not, either (charitably) to avoid a civil war in the party going into the debt limit hike, or (cynically) to prevent them from booting him from the Speaker's chair. But what all 3 of those options have in common is that they act under the aegis and with the apparent blessing of the Republican party, so that's where the blame can most reasonably be stuck.
When Congress last shut down the government, the Republican party suffered for it. The next two election cycles eroded their ranks and bumped Bill Clinton handily to a second term. If one looks at opinion polls today, one might expect the same outcome: Republicans shellacked, House leadership rebuked, Obama and the Democrats strengthened. And maybe this will happen. One certainly may hope. But the funny thing is, House Republicans can see all the same national polling data that the rest of us can, and they aren't budging. Why?
Find out ... after the jump!
