Statement from Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the Senate Budget Committee chair, who has been at the center of the stalled budget negotiations all year:
After blocking Senate Democrats’ attempts to start a budget conference 18 times over the past six months, Republicans are now scrambling to start a conference committee with mere minutes to go before a government shutdown. This is just the latest absurd and desperate attempt by Speaker Boehner to delay the inevitable–bringing a clean continuing resolution to the floor for Democrats and Republicans to vote on–and to continue pushing the country toward a completely unnecessary government shutdown. If Republicans were truly serious about avoiding a crisis they would pass the Senate’s short-term funding bill to remove the threat of a government shutdown immediately. We won’t negotiate while Republicans are threatening families and the economy with a crisis.
White House orders commencement of government shutdown procedures. Read it here.
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:
The troops are insulated from the government shutdown, right? Not so much, explains Heather Hurlburt.
Democrats’ margin over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot is the largest Quinnipiac has measured so far in this cycle.
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.”
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.”