The federal government on Sunday morning barreled toward its first shutdown in 17 years after the Republican-run House, choosing a hard line, voted to attach a one-year delay of President Obama’s health care law and a repeal of a tax to pay for it to legislation to keep the government running.
The votes, just past midnight, followed an often-angry debate, with members shouting one another down on the House floor. Democrats insisted that Republicans refused to accept their losses in 2012, were putting contempt for the president over the good of the country and would bear responsibility for a shutdown. Republicans said they had the public on their side and were acting to protect Americans from a harmful and unpopular law that had already proved a failure.
There is a very simple way to solve this. If we shut down the government, then we shut down the whole smash: prisons, medicare, “all essential services.” I guarantee once inmates start walking out of the federal prison, the Washington gridlock would end in 10 minutes.
A truly thoughtful and perfectly Randian solution – one wonders what new prison would await common folk in the brand new Boehner-Ryan-Cantor utopia.
Archer_of_the_Forest,
You might well be correct. However, on the down side of that solution is the likelihood that the problem of unavoidable national bankruptcy would simply be that much closer to becoming a reality. I would suggest that the latter consequence is becoming far more threatening and far more damaging than the former. The Federal government is simply out of control, and increasingly so. Pretending otherwise is, I would humbly suggest, delusional.
Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer