Republican hard-liners block strategy to avoid federal government shutdown

Washington stumbled toward a shutdown as the Republican Party’s rebellious right wing on Thursday blocked a strategy by House Speaker John A. Boehner for navigating a series of deadlines to keep the government funded and avoid a first-ever default.

Boehner (R-Ohio) and his leadership team revealed the first step of that plan to rank-and-file lawmakers early Thursday, urging conservatives to shift their assault on President Obama’s health-care law to the coming fight over the federal debt limit.

That would allow lawmakers in the meantime to try to reach an agreement on a plan to fund federal agencies into the new fiscal year, which begins Tuesday, and avoid a shutdown.

But about two dozen hard-liners rejected that approach, saying they will not talk about the debt limit until the battle over government funding is resolved.

“Quite frankly, I think that’s primarily where we need to be putting our attention,” said Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.), who has led the drive in the House to use the threat of a shutdown to defund the health-insurance initiative, Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Late Thursday afternoon, Boehner convened an emergency meeting of his leadership team to try to hash things out. They emerged with no answers, and no clear path forward for any piece of legislation, either to keep the lights on in Washington or to make sure the Treasury Department can continue to pay the nation’s bills by raising the borrowing limit.

Is it just me....or is it possible that all of these soap opera ‘end-of-time’ scripts now seem to consume Congress almost through an entire normal legislative year? Since 2009....they seemed consumed with vast arguments that roll over, reinvent themselves, come back again and again, always seeming to be vampire-like and simply not reaching resolve?

I would blame the Senate for being consumed with Sunday talk show chatter, and unable to reach any consensus other than what the President’s latest theme revolves around. But the truth is...we have an administration that has no experience at dealing with resolution or conflict. It’s almost comical that everything they invent for public consumption....needs confrontation to breath life into it. Nothing is ever resolved that is beneficial for the nation.

The various idiots that appear and talk of some new administrative effort to unblock the various stalemates? I don’t take any of them serious. It’s like a fake public relations effort...talking talk but never doing anything worth much.

By 2016, I think another generation of Senators will retire and move on....simply tired of this game being played out. They used to be able to meet, discuss a dozen issues a year, resolve half of them in a fair fashion, attend baseball games, play poker on Tuesday nights, and just worry about election issues once every two years. Now? You worry about elections....365 days out of the year, and your campaign manager is an absolute full-time guy....even the week after you won your election (he’s already back at work for the next episode).

Well, there is a battle going on. And as hard and as frustrating as it is to watch, it needs to happen. The Republican leadership has long had a losing strategy (decade long losing strategy) that under the 0bama regime has become a one trick dog show, rollover!

This strategy battle between the new young republicans(tea party) and the old rollover republicans is what we’re seeing. We put into place back in 2010 and a few more in 2012 a new set of ‘dog trainers’ and we’re working an old dog who doesn’t want to learn a new trick.

So come 2014 we need to replace these old dogs. Between now and then it doesn’t do us much good to scream and yell at the old dog. He’s just gotten too old, too stiff, and too stubborn.

This will be painful for us, but like the old hunting dog the owner decides to retire, we too must retire the old dogs. It will be fine, but we need to turn our focus forward to bringing in the new pups and getting them trained right this time.

If “keeping the lights on in Washington” means continuing to maintain such things as ‘the office of the first lady’ with her staff of twenty attendants and salary expenses alone of 1.25 million—well, they can turn out those lights.
Then we can look at closing out another couple dozen dead-head federal agencies, as well as asking Barry to return his US Treasury checkbook to Congress.
But first strangle the ‘Affordable Care Act’s in its crib. This will be a good start. Then we start turning out the lights of feckless (like the gop-e) feather-bedding federal boondoggles, fellow Cruzaders. They’ve lived too long.

translation: Obama wants to introduce all these “wonderful” things that will make your life a lot better by having government control everything you do. Isn’t it wonderful? And nasty, evil Republicans are trying to stop Dear Leader from doing all these wonderful things for you. Aren’t they all anarchists, nihilists, and probably terrorists for opposing Dear Leader’s plans? (snicker)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.