GOP fail

Now that the Republicans have sufficiently embarrassed themselves while managing to embarrass the country with their dangerous game of brinkmanship, it’s safe to say, as does this New York Times blog post, the strategy of using the federal default to win political battles in Washington is probably all but dead in the water, much like the GOP will be if it doesn’t purge itself of the Tea Party and toe a somewhat more moderate line a la Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

In addition to appearing not only unprofessional but sophomoric in their attempts to hold the government hostage until their demands were met, Republicans in the House also looked incredibly weak since the strategy, as we all know now, failed and failed miserably. President Obama and the Democrats were not going to flinch on defunding Obamacare, a bill that was considered, vetted and passed by a democratically elected House and Senate and upheld by the Supreme Court.

Next up in the health care debate: Let’s defund Medicare

Earlier this week, I mentioned how Paul Krugman called the GOP’s power brokering in Washington “unprecedented” in American politics, but what must be even more astounding as we sit this side of the government shutdown that has already affected national parks, the Statue of Liberty site, 800,000 jobs and more, is the fact that House Republicans have held the government hostage on a disagreement about a health care act, Obamacare, that is already on the books.

If the Affordable Care Act was just a proposal or an unpassed piece of legislation sitting on someone’s desk, this might not be such a big deal. But here we are talking about current law that is being disputed at the expense of funding the next fiscal year of government. It would be the same if Republicans decided just out of the blue that they no longer want to fund Medicare, and they were determined to block any legislation for funding the general government until Medicare was dismantled. Imagine the blow back from this. Of course, this particular scenario would never happen since the GOP largely depends on the senior demographic for a good majority of its support. Meanwhile, young and minority voters can just fend for themselves and can go straight to the poverty line if they happen to get sick. What do House Republicans care, since most of those votes will go to Democrats anyway? And Republicans wonder why they can’t turn out more of the young vote and why they are becoming more irrelevant with each passing year.

Needless to say, the current maneuvering on the health care bill is a dirty and shameful bit of politicking on the part of Tea Party Republicans, and if it’s not blatantly obvious at this point, Speaker John Boehner has clearly lost control of his own party in the House.

Constructive meeting between Obama, Reps

How unprecedented was the meeting and Q&A between President Obama and Republican leaders? I’m not sure, but it seems that nothing of this nature has taken place in decades, if ever. Here’s a portion of Obama’s speech prior to the Q&A session.

It seems like we have clambered through this partisan quagmire for the last two-three decades or more, and as someone who is opposed to the two party system (because issues aren’t always, and rarely are, two-sided) I thought a meeting such as this between the president and the opposition party had the potential to be incredibly constructive.

The key point, I thought, from President Obama’s brief speech Friday at a Republican caucus, was this:

I don’t believe that the American people want us to focus on our job security. They want us to focus on their job security.

Which, of course, cuts to the quick of a longstanding problem among politicians that they too often embrace causes only for the sake of winning them votes in the next election rather than embracing causes to make this country we love a better place.

You can read about the question and answer session with the president here and here.

Here is Part 1 of The New York Times’ account of the event, and here is Part 2.