Shutdown, Day Wev

Republicans still terrible. Government still shut down.

Senate Republicans are heading to the White House this morning to meet with President Obama, in the hopes of, I dunno, trying to find some way to get the dipshits in their party over in the House to agree to stop destroying the nation for two seconds. Good luck, everyone!

There is a House proposal, of sorts, on the table, which is garbage. This morning, the New York Times editors call it, politely, "an inadequate offer."

If House Republicans were reasonable, they would have raised both the debt ceiling and passed a clean continuing resolution to end the shutdown. That would have immediately produced a willingness on the part of President Obama and Senate Democrats to begin negotiations on the budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.

For now, House leaders seem to have dropped their demand to tie the reopening of government to ending health care reform. But as they shift back to the longer-running dispute over spending, they still want to use the continuing shutdown as their weapon to extract more cuts from the budget without any revenue increases.

Each day the shutdown continues, the lack of services grows more acute. Republicans know that they are hurting those most dependent on government assistance (who tend to be Democratic constituents). To cite just one example, many states are about to run out of federal nutrition aid to the poor. Michigan, along with other states, is close to shutting down its Women, Infant and Children feeding program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, school lunches, and food stamps

House leaders are still working on the details of their debt-ceiling proposal. But even Senate Republicans have grown weary of the House's confrontational tactics, and plan to include an end to the shutdown as part of any debt-ceiling bill that emerges from the House.

Asked whether any negotiations over the budget will take place if the government remains closed, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, on Thursday gave an answer that was firm and correct: "Not gonna happen."

Good. It would have been nice if the Democrats had called the Republicans' bluff at any point in the last 30 or so years before this point, before people were literally risking starvation because of the Republicans' indecent game-playing, but at least they're taking a stand now. Let's hope they keep standing.

Meanwhile, amidst the Republican radicals run amok, here's another article about Republicans who are agitated about the turn their party has taken, and all I can do is laugh mirthlessly in their general direction. This was always going to be the endgame of the contemptible strategies the GOP has been using to get elected for decades. Whoops. Whoops for America. Whoops for us all.