FoxNews.com prefers to refer to it as a government “slimdown.”
So Boehner secretly fought to hold on to hold on to health care subsidies for congressional staff. As it happens, it makes sense that he would since what’s being proposed puts burdens on congressional staff that no one else in the country is forced to face. But telling since he’s now making doing the opposite a condition of reopening the government.
We just did the math: The House has now voted 46 times to kill off Obamacare.
46 times!
And yet … Rand Paul said on CNN this morning, “We haven’t had a big debate about Obamacare really since it passed in Congress.”
Jon Stewart on government shutdown false equivalency: “This is when someone is driving to work and there’s a car coming directly at them in their lane. That’s not a game of chicken. That’s an a**hole causing a head-on collision.”
Democrats’ margin over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot is the largest Quinnipiac has measured so far in this cycle.
The troops are insulated from the government shutdown, right? Not so much, explains Heather Hurlburt.
Terse, acerbic John Boehner was just on display in a middle of the night press conference that didn’t seem to serve any purpose for him or his party. With the government shutdown a little more than an hour old and his party having just voted to approve a negotiating gambit that the Democratic Senate rejected before it even became official, all eyes were on Boehner for clues about what comes next — and what tone he would set.
He ignored a couple of questions — including one about what he would say to those government workers who would be furloughed — instead sticking to talking points about legislative arcana. Then he just as abruptly walked away.
If this is going to the be the public face of the Republican Party for the duration of the shutdown, it’s going to be more politically painful than most people predicted.
Here’s the video: