NY Times - "House Leaves U.S. on Brink of Shutdown"

[TomCADem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/politics/budget-talks-government-shutdown.html

WASHINGTON — The federal government on Saturday barreled toward its first shutdown in 17 years after House Republicans, choosing a hard line, demanded a one-year delay of President Obama’s health care law and the repeal of a tax to pay for the law before approving any funds to keep the government running.

Republicans emerged from a closed-door meeting Saturday unified and confident that they had the votes to delay the health care law and eliminate a tax on medical devices that partly pays for it. But before the House had even voted, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said that when the Senate reconvened on Monday it would strip out both provisions.

The House’s action all but assured that large parts of the government would be shuttered as of 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday. More than 800,000 federal workers deemed nonessential faced furloughs; millions more could be working without paychecks.

A separate House Republican bill would also ensure that military personnel continued to be paid in the event of a government shutdown, an acknowledgment that a shutdown was likely. The health law delay and the troop funding bill were set for House passage Saturday.

[markpkessinger]

1. A comment I just posted to the article

Here is the text of a comment I just posted to the article (which hasn't yet appeared on the site):

Mark Kessinger
[font color="gray"']New York, NY[/font]

Under what theory of democratic governance or constitutional law is an organized fadtion of elected representatives -- elected, ostensibly at least, to represent the people who elected them -- entitled to knowingly and willfully inflict, or threaten to inflict, harm upon the republic as a means of extracting a policy agenda they have been unable to achieve at the ballot box or through legitimate legislative means? Certainly none that I know of. In doing so, the GOP members of the House have created a crisis of constitutional governance if ever there was one.

Unfortunately, the Constitution doesn't contemplate such a scenario (but then, it should be added that neither does that document contemplate a two-party system or the existence of a 'debt ceiling'). What the Constitution is clear about, however, as per the 14th Amendment, that "[t]he validity of the public debt of the United States , , , shall not be questioned. Therefore, the President, pursuant to his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" and as a matter of national security, should instruct the Dept. of the Treasury to simply ignore the debt ceiling and continue to fund the operation and debt obligations of the government. Protecting the country from the willful infliction of harm by a minority faction would be a perfectly valid and legitimate legal defense for the President in the impeachment effort that would surely follow (and would just as surely fail).

[blkmusclmachine]

2. Yay, bipartisanship.

Or is it 11-Dimensional checkers???