Government Shutdown: The Only Way To Resolve The Question Of Presidential Legitimacy?

    I have hesitated to post anything about the current budget impasse in Washington. I know that one of the traditional benefits of federal employment has been job security. That's a big reason many federal employees took their jobs. Any threat to job security worries federal employees even more than private sector employees. In the end these budget impasses are almost always resolved without a government shutdown so why worry people unnecessarily? Jonathan Chait writing in New York Magazine explains why this impasse is looking very dangerous:

The incipient showdown in Washington is ... very much a crisis of legitimacy. American government has developed customs for resolving the divided government problem [when the White House and Congress are in the hands of different parties]. In the best cases, the two parties try to compromise. In the worst cases, failure to compromise leads to stalemate. ...

Since taking control of the House of Representatives in 2011, a coterie of Republicans has challenged this informal approach. Their belief is that the absence of cooperation should lead not to stalemate but to the president bending to their will. That assumption implies a delegitimization of the presidency that Obama has come to understand, belatedly, that he can’t accept. ...

The tension between the two parties is higher now than ever before because they disagree not only on underlying policy but on the basic premises of shared governance. Obama recognizes that allowing debt-ceiling hostage crises to become enshrined would not only subject him to continuing extortion but set the system on course for an eventual default when, inevitably, ransom negotiations fail at the last minute. Establishment Republicans are trying to talk their base out of extreme measures without addressing their deeper belief that House Republicans are entitled to extract concessions from the president, via threat, without compromising at all. ...

      Even before Republican Congressman Joe Wilson shouted "You Lie!" at President Obama during an address to a joint session of Congress in September 2009, Republicans were mounting an all out effort to delegitimize President Obama. This process accelerated after the 2010 election and has not abated even since Obama decisively defeated Mitt Romney to gain a second term of office. As ridiculous as it would sound to most people, I think it is taken as an article of faith in many Republican circles that regardless of the election results, Barack Obama has no right to be President of the United States. To compromise with Obama is to concede that he is the rightful President of the United States and this they cannot do.
     This dispute may get papered over again before the end of September but my guess is that we're past that. The country needs a resolution to this problem. There's going to have to be a winner and a loser in this showdown. We won't get that sort of clear cut result without a government shutdown. That may be the price we have to pay.