The Shrine

I thought this was something that was all negotiated a long time ago?

Thanks for taking Ted Cruz into your country and away from ours... And for taking his eyebrows too.

It comes up, from what I understand, constantly unless the congress is passing budgets. The debt ceiling gets raised in increments either way, it's just it hasn't come up as much in the past because it's insane that a political party would hold the country hostage to achieve goals that no one really wants.

The Republicans have been blocking budgets in congress since Obama was elected. The first few times it was kind of showing how they could flex their power and ideally it would show how powerless Obama was. This time it will show how out of touch the party is with its actual base so it won't let down a vocal minority in the GOP.

Usually I hate reporting like this but this guy echoes what I've been thinking basically verbatim. It's a joke and we're the punchline. The only thought that keeps from getting super depressed about this is that between this and the voter restriction laws, the Republicans seem to be doing their best to hold onto whatever they have before they start losing it all in future elections. The older and whiter the GOP gets, the more insular and xenophobic their policies seem to get. As the United States grows in minority voters and the young reach voting age, they're just going to become more and more irrelevant. They've already sunk low enough to resort to gerrymandering and if the democrats ever get them to knock that off the party will die off unless it can transform. Also the Democrats need to work on becoming more competitive in red states. I don't know what it is but there's hardly anyone electable running on the Democrat ticket in red states. There are practical reasons for this, but you can't expect to ever have any power in such a big country if you're only running electable people on the East and West coasts.

The Republican party probably will transform within our life times, but I can't see ever voting Republican for any reason. Sharing party lines with some of the most vile people in the country... Ugh. Not all Republicans are racist, xenophobic, homophobes, but basically all of them vote Republican. I can see why people would want less government involvement and all that jazz, but I just don't see how you could support the rest of what they do and sleep at night.

I don't see why they can't just let Obamacare do its thing for a while and then fix and gut what doesn't and won't work. At the very least it will show EVERYONE how incredibly fucked up healthcare in this country is and with less ignorance at play maybe some shit will actually get fixed for once.


Ahhh. That post felt good.

The problem isn't the process it's the people involved. I mean you can change the issue from Obamacare to invading Canada or anything else crazy and the same logic applies. Even if a handful of crazy guys wants some crazy things, there clearly isn't enough of these guys to prevent you from getting a 2/3 majority or whatever the procedure is to overwrite them. Just because those crazy guys are in your party doesn't mean you suddenly have to vote yes on invading Canada too.

To expand on what Don was saying... (wow... normally that just isn't possible)

The US government seems to have lost any desire to actually do what is right for its citizens.

How Congress is acting reminds me of the stereotypical medieval lords/barons bickering over petty self-interest.

Political stakes in the US are far too high - especially in the case of the personal interests of the individual holding office. Gotta get these people out of constant campaign mode and get them to actually focus on governing.

*shrug* They're Tea party elected officials, that means people somewhere voted them into office.

If you elect 10 guys who want to invade Canada it doesn't mean they've anywhere near the votes to actually push any kind of agenda. Right now the problem is that for some inexplicable reason the rest of the party has to vote along with the 10 guys who want to invade Canada instead of just saying 'wait that doesn't make a lot of sense, maybe we should vote against it'. It doesn't matter how crazy or entrenched the Tea Party guys are. There's nowhere near enough of those guys to actually cause the problem because they're nowhere close to 1/3 let alone 1/2.

There's a number of factors keeping the GOP in power (so far):

1. Fox News is keeping the echo chamber running with a severe disinformation campaign. (Also see: Australia.) Most of the rest of the media is keeping this BSABSVR false equivalency bullshit. Jon Stewart reamed them on that last point in relation to the shutdown. Certain parts of MSNBC and certain parts of the Internet are the only sources you can trust to provide decent political information any more.

2. Gerrymandering, which is what created these assholes in the House in the first place. It's going to be very tough to get rid of them even after this mess. Thank god the Senate is immune to this tactic.

3. Passionate racists and bigots who seem to do everything in their power to promote a party that is against their own interests.

4. Constant rigging of voter registration laws, voting times, voting machines, and anything to keep (mostly) Democrats from being allowed to vote.

Hell, the reason why we have such a debt problem IS the Republicans. You can't just keep shaving down the government to prevent debt and expect the economy to recover. Keynesian economics has proven to work time and time again. And now this fight over national debt may cause ANOTHER economic meltdown.

The political system isn't really a big issue. Again just replace "repeal Obamacare" with "invade Canada" and it'll be obvious how absurd this whole issue is. Sure you can certainly do some trickery to keep 10 whackos solidly entrenched, but that's still just 10 whackos. The Tea Party guys aren't exactly senior members so it's not like say the Speaker of the House is a whacko and wants to push some crazy agenda, and it'd be relatively difficult to just ignore him. I get that the Republic party probably feels like it'd look bad if they voted against the Tea Party but do they really think they're looking strong right now?

There's supposed to be a democractic process to get stuff passed or overturn stuff, and it works fine even with all the aforementioned problems because both sides know how to play this game. What you're not supposed to do is threaten to shut down the government just because you didn't win. Stuff like debt ceiling used to be just a minor bargaining chip, because nobody would actually think about not letting the USA default which would screw up the nation and probably screw up the entire world. It's not supposed to be tied to major laws at all.

Don wrote:What you're not supposed to do is threaten to shut down the government just because you didn't win. Stuff like debt ceiling used to be just a minor bargaining chip, because nobody would actually think about not letting the USA default which would screw up the nation and probably screw up the entire world. It's not supposed to be tied to major laws at all.

This is what happens when you Gerrymander districts into a collection of crazies hellbent on voting for a collection of crazies.

Congratulations, you now have crazy people as your representatives. Worse, they seem to not have the intelligence (or are too overconfident) to think this would get them elected out of office. They are like suicide bombers.

I really doubt this is the first time we've a bunch of crazies in office. I mean you got 500+ guys in the House of Representatives and statistically some of those people ought to be crazy just by chance. I believe most of the Tea Party guys are on first term so it's not like you're talking about an equivalent of say a Supreme Justice where even if you know the guy is crazy you can't get rid of him and he has a ton of power. These guys are just like any other guy. It's easy to blame on the extreme guys but the rest of the party should have enough sense to not vote along with them.

No, it's not for the first time. But, when a group of people don't believe the consequences are great, they can potentially risk everything, and only realize the danger after it's too late.

The GOP also has a hivemind mentality and is very leery of "defectors". Especially now with "The Purge" going on within the ranks.

It's just a very bad combination. It's not the first time, but we've had some very bad outcomes throughout our government, the kinds of things we would not want to repeat.

I think the Republic party is way too fixiated on voting on the party line, never mind that the Tea Party isn't even the Republican party. Like I hear the more moderates say this isn't going anywhere. Well there sure are a lot more of them than the Tea Party guys so it's not exactly hard to get whatever votes they need to overwrote them. I know the Speaker of the House doesn't totally endorse those viewpoints but I guess he doesn't want to look bad by giving in, even though they already look bad to everyone to begin with.