Jonathan Chait, writing in the New Republic:
I think a lot of people are underrating the potential for a government shutdown. Here is the dynamic. ...
You can't convince your base that the president is destroying freedom, undermining capitalism, and threatening 1920s Germany-style inflation, and then turn around and tell them to just wait things out for two years. ...
[I]t's worth delving a bit deeper into the GOP's historical understanding of the government shutdown [in 1995]. The Republican view of this episode -- and I remember this at the time, from my GOP staffer housemate -- was that the whole idea that Republicans shut down the government was a big lie concocted by the Clinton administration and abetted by the liberal media. Clinton, they believe, is the one who shut down the government. After all, if he had agreed to the Republican terms, there would have been no shutdown.
This is actually, as far as I can tell, a fairly unanimous belief among Republicans. ...
The GOP will have figure out how to negate the non-stop nightly news stories like ABC, CBS and NBC ran every night in 1995 of people on vacation and the Air and Space Museum being closed. Boo Hoo our vacation has been ruined because of those Republicans.
ReplyDeleteThose who ignore history are doomed to repeat it....
ReplyDelete...and if the republicans had listened to clinton, the 1995 shutdown would not have happened, either.
ReplyDeleteshutdowns are like garbage strikes. you really figure out what you value in the govt when all the services stop.
It backfired on the Republicans the last time it happened and if they didn't learn that lesson, well...they live in their own fantasy world. The American people suffer when this happens but the politicians don't really care. It is their political agenda that matters most.
ReplyDelete