In Approps Fight, House GOP Are "Getting To 'No'"

David A. Fahrenthold and Amy Gardner have a nice profile of the corner into which House conservatives have painted themselves on the looming government shutdown. They quote freshman Republican Tim Griffin of Arkansas saying "I don't want a shutdown" but when they ask him why he won't accept a compromise, he says he basically can't.

According to Michael Grimm of New York, another GOP freshman, "There are many Republicans that feel that they gave their word to their constituents that they wouldn't back down." After all, lots of Tea Partiers think a shutdown would be excellent:

I think the best insights about politics are often in books that aren't explicitly about politics, and I love a business book called Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. A lot of what you've seen from House conservatives in this debate illustrates their points. When you want to get an agreement, you lead with principles rather than positions. And in the case of the short-term CRs, this is exactly how the House leadership has negotiated. Their principle is reductions in domestic non-defense discretionary spending. Then they try to see if there's anything Democrats prefer to a shutdown that exemplifies those ideas.

But on the ultimate deal, they're doing the reverse—leading with positions. That means defund Planned Parenthood, defund NPR, defund the Affordable Care Act, defend financial regulation, defund the EPA. One can have those policy objectives if one is so inclined. Lots of people in America don't care about women's health or the state of the environment and the avowed goal of House Republicans is to serve the banks. But these are positions that are plainly incompatible with the idea of reaching an agreement. And these guys aren't idiots. They recognize that there's no way the Democratic majority in the Senate or the Democrat in the White House will agree to all this stuff. They may say that they don't want a shutdown, but holding these things out as goals to be achieved in 2011 rather than as things that will happen if they win more elections, is just a way of insisting on one.