Their "leverage" is shutting down the government. I am blaming them for shutting down the government, because that is what they are doing. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Again, you can argue if they're justified or morally in the right or whether this will pragmatically work for them, but you are dancing around the responsibility of owning the shutdown that they're forcing.

If you want to talk about the metaphilosophy of the shutdown, then I'd say with the sparsity of supermajorities in the past decades with the cementing of the filibuster and the firmly rooted two party system, the minority party has always held this power to shut down the government and the majority party has always held the power to go nuclear and put an end to this nonsense. And our system of governance is not resilient in an abstract game theory analysis of min/maxing zero sum players attempting to thwart one another, because if it came to democrats and republicans doing everything in their power, the constitution would get torn to shreds within a fortnight. Our government has only clung to existence because there is a shared civic spirit and agreement on compromise, one which is threatened by partisan strife, one which previously led to schism and war when compromise broke down. Why bother with constitutional amendments when the ultimate law of the land is might is right?

Solution...

During any govt. shutdown, don't pay the Congressmen.

people will blame who they want to be at fault
gonna be like any other issue over the last year
trumps 3x % base point one way
the rest point the other
and then a few days later we're back to stories of dalliances with porn stars and days spent on the golf course
all midterm foreplay

Pretty much. Both sides have a point on the DACA issue, I guess the swing states will show who gets more blame.

Fucking Tea Party. Oh wait...

People with external locus of controls will blame everything else and not look inward.

That is happening here. GOP blaming the Dems because they can't get their senators to vote for the garbage they want to pass just so they can say they passed something.

The gnashing of teeth is fun to watch. If the GOP had an effective executive We would all already be forced to march goose step bearing arms while reciting the lords prayer and checking brown people for their papers. Instead theyre shitting in the bed and blaming people who aren't even there.

It won't get better for them until they take some self ownership. They are so far away from that though. They will write paragraphs about Chuck Schumer as if he could stop a united GOP.

And it is good they're failing. They actively plot and act against every American who clocks in anywhere.




They could blame the party who is was voted in charge.

Conservative voters vote against their interests all the time though. Trump ran on repealing their health insurance, got selected, tried to do that, and everyone freaked out.

Now we have a trailer park POTUS.

At least we know you are comfortable with hypocracy, given the golfing comments. The rest of us are wondering when he is going to show up for work. WH should have a no social media on the clock policy. Can't imagine people sitting at my hospital on Twitter all day instead of actually doing anything.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jan 21 2018 10:37am

Come now, you know full well that even without a few defectors the GOP does not have enough votes and the democrats fully hold the ability to filibuster and shut down the government no matter if the republicans are 100% behind the leadership or 95%
The only way the republicans could force the shutdown to end without any democratic support would be a nuclear deployment, and 1) nobody wants that on either side and 2) they probably don't have the votes anyway.

When the Dems had a supermajority and could have passed universal single payer healthcare in 2008 but didn't because they couldn't get Olympia Snowe on board, for symbolic reasons so they could say it was bipartisan....we blamed Obama and the Democrats.

I wish you still had thst consistency. A threat of filibuster is a threat. They aren't easy, and they never happen. Just excuses. If this and only this was the case, they would let them filibuster and put it all over television and score points.

I can't wait until the midterms. There is absolutely no reason for any D to work with any R in congress now because their shelf life has just diminished greatly. We will get a party that doesn't work against hard working Americans back in power.

Abolish Medicare and Social security. The government would never shut down again

Medicare? Not Medicaid?

I think you have that backwards.

Also, we have universal health care and not universal insurance. That is the crux of our problems.

Either need universal insurance like Medicaid is doing already, or repeal EMTALA.

Medicaid will pay for a bum to live in a nursing home for the rest of his life. If you work and have private insurance and need long term care it nor Medicare will pay, only for skilled nursing level of care (short term physical rehab).

But if you drink and don't work and pickle your brain just apply to Medicaid and they will pay the 300$ a day it would cost me with private insurance, even my Cadillac plan, or Medicare, out of pocket.

I know the individual problems better than most having done a lot of discharge planning and utilization review at hospitals.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jan 21 2018 10:54am