GOP will pay ultimate price for shutdown

   The partial government shutdown is now entering its second week, and if you listen to the political pundits, there's plenty of blame to go around for the mess we find ourselves in. I agree. Both parties share the blame for this mess. But in the long run, I believe it is the GOP that will pay the ultimate price.
  To be fair, this budget fight is nothing new. In fact, according to the American Prospect, the last time this nation had a real budget passed by Congress and signed by the president was in 1997, at the beginning of former President Bill Clinton's second term. Since then, our government has been surviving on a series of "continuing budget resolutions." They have become the new normal. The closest thing we've managed to passing a real budget in recent years was a gargantuan "omnibus" spending bill in 2009. So a budget impasse is nothing new. What IS new this time around is the GOP's decision to hold government hostage by forcing a shutdown until they can wring some concessions from the Democrats -- principally the defunding or complete dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. This is where the GOP is making a huge strategic blunder.
   If today's GOP leaders in the House had bothered to study their recent history -- especially in the past 20 years -- they would know that government shutdowns almost never work well for the GOP. The last time the government shut down, 17 years ago, the GOP was blamed. The end result was a strong reelection victory for Clinton in the November election. And it looks like the same thing is beginning to happen now. According to a CNN/ORC poll released today (Monday), 63 percent of respondents are angry at Republicans for the way they are handling the shutdown. I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd say we could safely predict that the GOP will lose control of the House in the 2014 midterms and likely see the Democratic majority in the Senate grow, possibly to a filibuster-proof 60-plus seats. The sad part is, this didn't have to happen.
   Republicans can try to pin this shutdown on President Obama and the Democrats as much as they want. They can point out until they're blue in the face that they sent numerous budget proposals over to the Senate in the days preceding the shutdown. But each of those proposals included language that would have permanently defunded or otherwise dismantled Obamacare. They knew those proposals stood no chance of passing the Senate. The Affordable Care Act stands as Obama's singular and most significant achievement. It was unrealistic to think that either the  president or his party would do anything to undermine that accomplishment, especially since it had been upheld by a conservative U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. Nor should they have had to.
   Imagine if the roles were reversed. Imagine that a Democratic House had sent the Senate a budget that defunded or dismantled No Child Left Behind, or refused to fund the War on Terror. Does anyone think Republicans would have agreed to those terms? Of course not. And the same principle applies here. The truth is, Congress has had months to pass a budget. Instead of acknowledging defeat on the Obamacare front and actually doing their jobs, House Republicans, led mainly by the Tea Party fringe, have dug in their heels and tried more than 40 times to repeal Obamacare. To make matters worse, the dim bulbs in the House made sure that when the government shut down, THEY would still receive THEIR paychecks. Way to share the suffering with your constituents, fellas.
   Maybe the Democrats in the Senate should have been more willing to compromise. Maybe they should have stood above the gamesmanship being played in the House and not engaged in the back and forth with the GOP in an effort to score political points. But when it comes right down to it, it is the GOP that will bear the brunt of the public's wrath for the latest government shutdown and the damage it is doing to our economy, and it is hard to see how it should be any other way. They brought it on themselves.