The necessary thing to understand about
the shutdown is that nobody in power seriously claims that the
shutdown is, in and of itself, a good policy. Some politicians are
trying desperately to spin it as no big deal, or some sort of
government vacation, or a “slimdown,” but nobody actually
believes it is tenable to adopt the shutdown as a permanent policy.
In other words, everyone loses when the government is shut down. That
is a fact which nobody is seriously attempting to contest.
Once we accept that the shutdown is, of
itself, bad for everyone, the baseline is laid for understanding why
the shutdown is the GOP's fault. The entire point of driving the
government to shutdown is to try and force democrats to make
concessions they would not otherwise have made. Everyone agrees that
a world without a shutdown is better than a world with a shutdown.
The GOP just hopes that the democrats care more than they do and are
the first to say “chicken.”
Democrats have proposed and passed a
bill in the senate that would end the shutdown and do nothing else at
all. Republicans have refused to take up that bill and pass it in the
house. Another important thing to note is that if the bill were
brought to a vote in the house, it would pass easily. A combination
of democrats and moderate republicans would give the bill an easy
majority in a simple vote.
The way the house works, though, the
Speaker, who is elected by the majority party, gets to decide which
bills are brought to the floor. A small but vocal section of the
republican party is against bringing the bill to a vote, so Speaker
Boehner refuses to do his job.
You might be inclined to say that we
should blame the small group of republicans that are blocking the
bill, and not all the other republicans. That is overly generous.
Remember that the other republicans choose to caucus with the tea
party wing. They came together to choose Boehner as speaker. They
bear a measure of collective responsibility for the actions of their
party leadership. They deliberately handed power over to Speaker
Boehner. They cannot now claim that they share no responsibility in
his actions. The moderates, if they wanted to, could bring pressure
on Boehner and end things right now. They choose not to. They are
afraid of upsetting their conservative base, and would rather just
stay quiet and claim they are powerless to do anything about the
shutdown.
The republican party, as a whole, is
responsible for the shutdown. An attempt to claim otherwise is
disingenuous.
The republican party is free to claim
that the shutdown is worth it because their goal is worth it. That is
a fine argument. They are free to believe that using a shutdown as a
hostage tactic is worth it because the ultimate goal is so noble.
That does not absolve them of responsibility for the shutdown. If I
shoot someone, I can argue that it was justified, but it does not
mean that I am not responsible for the shooting. Even if it was a
justified shooting, I am still responsible for the shooting.
It is in this way that republicans are
responsible for the shutdown. Whether or not they are justified, this
is still their shutdown. If they try and pass it off as not their
own, then they are refusing to take responsibility for their actions.
If a shutdown is worth having to end Obamacare, then they should
stand by that. They shouldn't blame other people for what is the
obvious outcome of their own negotiating strategy.
