Shutdown Corner
Erick Erickson has gauged the dynamics of the CR/shutdown fight and the looming debt ceiling fight pretty much perfectly, I think:
Republicans are winning the shutdown fight, and Democrats know it.
People turning on the news this week came away with the knowledge that it was about Obamacare and kept hearing that Democrats wouldn’t negotiate. They also learned that for some reason the President didn’t want Word War II veterans to tour their own memorial, and Harry Reid won’t turn the funding on for cancer clinical trials at the NIH. Oh, and the rollout for Obamacare is one big glitch.
Late yesterday came word that the Amber Alert system has been shut down, but Barack Obama’s federally funded golf course remains open. Catholics are openly fretting that priests on military bases could get arrested for performing mass — at the very least they are prohibited from doing so. . . .
So the question is do we want to stop Obamacare or do we want to stop the debt ceiling increase? My view is that we cannot do both at the same time. We might dare to dream, but the debt ceiling will be increased one way or the other.
Right now the GOP is holding up very well in the press and public opinion because it is clear they want negotiations. The GOP keeps passing legislation to fund departments of government. It has put the Democrats in an awkward position.
But the moment the GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, we are going to have problems. . . .
I think somebody like Steve Scalise, who chairs the Republican Study Committee, needs to propose a short-term debt limit for a few weeks and attach to it the Full Faith and Credit Act that ensures the Treasury Department prioritizes interest payments in the event the debt limit is ever not increased. This would buy us some time to finish the fight to defund Obamacare and set us up well to fight the next long-term debt limit increase to the death by removing some of the President’s scare tactics. How do Republican Leaders not adopt and push such a proposal? How does Obama not accept it without looking completely unreasonable?
To my eye, this is very shrewd. Republicans wanted a shutdown less than Democrats (or at least less than Harry Reid and Obama) did. But, as it turned out, the politics of the shutdown were unpredictable. They haven’t been particularly good for Obama and because of the way the field was shuffled, my guess is that they’re going to get progressively worse as the days go on.
The only exit available for them is the debt ceiling. Republicans ought to close that door pre-emptively and keep pressing the advantage on the question of Obamacare and the continuing resolution.
