For everyone who’s wondered about what whackadoo alternative universe the country’s fallen into these last two weeks, with Jim DeMint’s Heritage Action Fund and Senate Conservative’s Fund driving things forward, let’s remember this video from days after the 2012 election. Seriously. Just a moment. It will put it all in perspective. Watch.
A historical shutdown crisis you may not know about, involving Rutherford B. Hayes and the KKK.
Why today’s Supreme Court decision to accept a greenhouse gas case isn’t as worrisome as it might look.
After things collapsed on the House side, a Senate GOP aide told our Dylan Scott, “Ted Cruz and his Tortilla Coast Republicans are leading us to a default.”
House GOP leadership confirms no vote tonight on their mythical debt plan.
We were expecting a newly revised plan from Speaker Boehner to come up for a vote this evening, but that has now been delayed indefinitely. House leadership is saying no decision has been made yet and leadership will be meeting soon. But it seems clear that Boehner lacks the GOP votes to get this revised plan through.
Some classic Lindsey Graham special pleading here:
We won’t be the last political party to overplay our hand. It might happen one day on the Democratic side. And if it did, would Republicans, for the good of the country, kinda give a little? We really did go too far. We screwed up. But their response is making things worse, not better.
This is just one example – singing Amazing Grace at the caucus meeting planning the debt default. But as you survey the whole terrain of this multiheaded shutdown, ObamacareDefundo, debt default crisis, you start to see that the divide is not simply one of ideology but something more basic about the times we’re living in.
69% of self-identified Tea Party Republicans say the US “can go past the [debt default] deadline … without major economic problems.”