Bill Moyers: Let’s call the shutdown what it is — secession by another means.
TPM Reader PP:
I’m sure this isn’t a perspective lost on anyone, but has anyone asked the reps who want to breach the debt limit because it won’t be such a big deal why they think it is that they have such a great tool of leverage for extracting things with?
It seems that they want to have it both ways: They want the debt ceiling issue to be some hugely important thing to avoid in order to be able to get someone they would never ever be able to get by normal means, but they then want it to be “no big deal!” so they aren’t to be painted as people willing to light our country on fire.
If only Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was alive to tell this story.
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.
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.
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.
Sahil Kapur reports on this morning’s Supreme Court oral arguments in the next big campaign finance case.
“Well, it’s gonna take us off the edge economically. It’s gonna destroy our economy. And it’s going to push us into a total economic collapse of America. And that’s exactly what I mean by, ‘It’s gonna destroy America.'”
Alas, Paul Broun (R-GA) was talking about Obamacare, not the debt default he’s pushing for. Watch.