In a recent exchange on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” panelists went a few rounds on the GOP’s strategy for the upcoming budget showdowns (wily anarchists or slack-jawed yokels?) and talked about the pros and cons of “hostage taking” before MSNBC’s Chris Hayes chimed in with a pretty revealing comment, saying, “I think it is useful to separate the kind of tactical question here from the substantive one, which is to say, like, you know, if there were a liberal caucus in the United States government that could, you know, hold the continuing resolution hostage to try to stop a war that I thought was horrible, I would say, ‘Yeah, do it.’ The thing that they’re trying to stop here is 30 million people getting health insurance!”
It’s the substantive question liberals have a problem with these days, not the tactical one.
A potential shutdown over the continuing resolution or the debt ceiling would be fine if the issue happened to move the liberal soul. But Republicans can’t possibly have a legitimate reason to want to defund/delay/defeat/de-anything Obamacare. The GOP opposes the law because of an insatiable impulse to deny millions of poor Americans health insurance. If Hayes were to concede that genuine objections existed — however misguided he might find them — he’d also be conceding that conservatives have a purpose beyond his own cartoon depiction of free market beliefs.
In this cartoon, Republicans are obstructionists, and that’s that. When Reid says any Republican House budget he dislikes is “dead on arrival,” how many nonpartisan publications will call him out on his uncompromising position? When the president states that negotiating with Republicans over the debt ceiling “is not going to happen,” how many reporters are going to point out that his stubbornness could lead to a government shutdown?
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