In this essay, Bill Moyers calls the current shutdown/debt default ploy what it is. Secession by another means.
My only quibble is that it might be more accurately termed nullification, with real roots back almost two centuries back to John C. Calhoun. The refusal of a minority to abide by the democratic process and instead threaten to destroy the state if they don’t hold a permanent veto on anything the majority wants to do.
We’ve got a number of queries recently about whether we’re still on Google Currents or Flipboard of other similar services. The answer is no.
House Republicans have moved off the simple statement that they don’t have to bring any bill up for a vote that they don’t want to, which is true – absent a successful ‘discharge petition’. So now they’re stuck on this point that a ‘clean’ continuing resolution can’t pass the House. There are pretty good reasons to believe that is not true. But the bravado is totally belied by the fact that they’re afraid to bring it up for a vote.
Ridiculousness is a seriously devalued commodity in Washington these days. But this is one of those claims that is so preposterous that I’m not sure it can hold as an argument. It brings into increasingly sharp relief that the root of the national crisis is the Tea Party factions hold on the House GOP conference and thus the House and thus, alas, the entire country.