Playing Chicken

It’s no surprise to anyone that Republicans, primarily those in the House, are massively opposed to Obamacare. I suspect that this is primarily due to the fact that it’s named after their personal equivalent of Black Hitler, and also they have daddy issues. As it happens, I oppose Obamacare as well, though mainly on the grounds that it’s a halfassed attempt to mildly blunt a problem that should never have occurred in the first place (thanks, Richard Nixon! Your fucking us over knows few boundaries), but of course I’m not kicking and screaming like a little girl because, hey, someone in the government at least acknowledges the problem.

No so for House Republicans who have their collective panties in a wad so tight that coal production therefrom is a mathematical certainty. They have voted 38 times… no, really, 38… to repeal or delay Obamacare in any way. The most recent attempt at this did manage to delay two particular provisions, but this apparently isn’t enough to slake the conservative beast’s (read: republican voters that vote in the primaries, aka racist old people) thirst for the deaths of poor people at all costs. Amidst all the demands for cost cutting and holding the debt ceiling hostage last year, which incidentally was hugely damaging for Republicans politically,  they’ve decided they need to up their game.

So it looks like they now want to force a government shutdown over the debt ceiling if Obamacare gets funded.

I, for one, am overjoyed. I’m not joking, I love this. I hope they can arrange the votes to pull it off. The sooner we run this shit into the ground, the sooner something reasonable can rise from the ashes. But even aside from my optimism for an Accelerationist solution I’m hopeful, because what could possibly be funnier than watching them hold a gun to their heads and threaten to pull the trigger if they don’t get their way? Yes! Shine on you crazy diamonds!

Of course several congressional Republicans with varying amounts of common sense remaining (including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who was in the senate in the 90’s and remembers the fallout from the last shutdowns) are distancing themselves from this shit. This goes back to what I’d been suggesting over the election stuff last year. On the one hand, you have the old GOP core. On the other you have the increasingly-unhinged newer classes that are being voted in based on radicalized claims of conservatiivism due to a similarly increasingly-unhinged populace. That GOP core had their little shock in the primaries of the presidential race. Their golden boy candidate, Mitt Romney, got held up as the perfect opposition for Obama… and realistically, he was… only to find a base that was completely uninterested because he wasn’t, well, insane enough. Sooner or later that GOP core will be gone, and there’s not a reasonable Republican base being groomed to fill it. In truth, that may not matter in the long run. 

And now they’re pulling something this large. You know that last debt ceiling fight? It resulted in all those mandatory cost cutting measures in particular with the government and military personnel. I have several friends who are now seeing furloughs as a result of all of that, all of whom tend to vote conservatively. All of whom are either pissed, or incredibly anxious about it all. I’m sure they’re not looking forward to another shutdown. I’m also sure they’re not the only ones.