Katie’s Government Shutdown Rant

Facebook has this new feature where they show you “trending” posts. Like, your friend posted about Congress, you must want to see EVERY POST EVER WRITTEN about Congress! Which means I’ve been seeing posts by people like Rush Limbaugh and John Boehner, pointing the finger at the Senate and at Obama. “We sent a budget!” they whine. “You could have accepted it!”

Ok, that isn’t how this works at all, and here’s why.

The budgets sent by the House to the Senate involved various provisions limiting the start of the Affordable Care Act. They said this was a compromise – apparently because they don’t want a budget at all, so letting one through with the biggest piece of legislation of Obama’s presidency gutted is a huge sacrifice for them. This is nonsense for the following reasons:

First of all, the budget proposed was already a compromise. Democrats have compromised more than three billion dollars off the budget, so that the current proposal is less than PAUL RYAN’s original budget. No one can say that the Democratic party has not compomised.

Second of all, the House, led by Republicans, has voted to defund the Affordable Care Act more than 40 times. They also, you might recall, took their objections to the Supreme Court and lost. If there was a time to argue over funding of Obamacare, we have been there, done that, and got the t-shirt more than 40 times across all 3 branches of government.

The Republicans act like they had no choice, and their objections to the ACA were just going completely ignored, so they had to throw a tantrum to get anyone to listen to them. This is verifiably untrue. And even if they sincerely wanted to continue the discussion about how to best fund health care, there was NO reason they had to attach it to passing a budget – they could have passed a budget that didn’t mention the ACA, a so-called “clean continuing resolution,” and carried on the debate after agreeing to fund the government. Rachel Maddow has brilliantly pointed out that this was not really about health care – the Republicans have been trying to shut down the government literally since they won the 2010 midterm elections. In fact, they promised to do so campaigning.

Even if we’re pretending that the Republicans’ claims about health care should be taken seriously, they end up being wrong. They claim that the country can’t afford the costs of the Affordable Care Act. However, the Congressional Budget Office found that the ACA would REDUCE the deficit by more than $200 billion over the next 10 years. Meanwhile, the shutdown is going to cost literally millions of dollars. If we were worried about saving money, we seem to be doing it wrong.

IN CONCLUSION, if you see Republicans trying to blame the Democratic Senators and President Obama for the shutdown, remind them that the Democrats already have compromised, that they had their chances (more than 40 of them!) to argue about Obamacare, and that Republicans have literally been planning this for 3 years. It’s definitely their fault.

And then vote them out in November.

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