Writing in Roll Call, Stan Collender, author of “The Guide to the Federal Budget,” calls out Republicans in Congress for rebooting their threat to shut down the federal government this fall by reopening the debate over the 2012 budget.
This move is especially irksome, says Collender, because the “House, Senate and White House all agreed to the spending level for fiscal 2012 when the president signed the Budget Control Act on Aug. 2, almost two months before the fiscal year starts.”
Rebooting shutdown threats now would appear to be political suicide. A spate of polls has found Congress’ approval ratings at all-time lows. For example, at the end of August, Rasmussen, which is notoriously in the bag for the GOP, just 6 percent of voters said Congress was doing a “good” or “excellent” job. (Five percent said “good.” Just 1 percent said “excellent”). Two-thirds said Congress was doing a “poor” job.
Nonetheless, says Collender, Republicans will be proposing a short-term continuing resolution, or CR, for the fall:
The question that everyone should be asking is: Why is the House GOP only proposing a short-term continuing resolution?
This should be the moment when either individual appropriations or a full-year CR at the start of the year is not just easy to do but actually gets done…
The House this week is supposed to consider a continuing resolution — presumably endorsed by the GOP leadership — that would keep the government funded until only Nov. 18.
This needs to be said as directly as possible: There is no practical reason for a seven-week continuing resolution in this situation. A short-term CR such as this one will force Congress and the White House to spend additional time debating and passing a second funding bill less than two months from now that is absolutely unnecessary.
Collender is right. The reason isn’t practical, it’s political. First, Republicans are on record. Their prime directive is to make Pres. Obama a one-term president.
Secondly, Republicans are betting that Pres. Obama will wilt if faced with a government shutdown. They suspect, rightly, that if he capitulates again, he will turn Democrats’ 2010 enthusiasm gap into an enthusiasm chasm in 2012.
In any case, tea partyists and their poodles in the GOP leadership apparently see a showdown over a government shutdown as the only shot they’ve got. So here we go again.
If the Republicans really do revive their political extortion strategy this fall, we will see whether the president has finally given up his quixotic quest for world peace bipartisanship.
Let’s hope so. Much more than his presidency hangs in the balance.
At this point, I say the adults in the room should stop being enablers and if the GOP forces a shutdown — so be it.