Shutdown

Mrs. Half-Drunken Scribe is a non-furloughed federal employee. So she gets to keep working, probably for real money. Too many others aren't so lucky. That includes a lot of friends.

If congressional Republicans want to strike Obamacare from history, they need to appropriate funding to build a time machine, and use it to get Mitt Romney elected president. Obamacare may not be the most popular legislation (though it becomes less unpopular when referred to by its proper name), but it was installed by a democratically-elected House and Senate, and backed by a president who ran on a platform to improve access to healthcare. It survived a Supreme Court challenge. And when that same president, who banked his job on this very law, won reelection, that was end game. That was the signal from on high that this law, warts and all, must be allowed to go forward. To aim for anything less is cheap, cowardly, and unconstitutional.

And those were the appropriate adjectives before a government shutdown and a default crisis got thrown into the mix. But, after all, this is the Tea Party: the self-important, half-informed, thin-skinned, cosplaying, paper patriots. People for whom the democratic process becomes moot as soon as it coughs up a result they don't like. People who love America so much, they're willing to kill it before anyone else... gets access to healthcare.

They're not fighting against something that was rammed down America's throat, as they would have you believe; America's had ample opportunity to shut this thing down. Sure, the law isn't great, but when Republicans make every effort to block the thing, it's not because they have a better idea. They didn't have an answer for preexisting conditions and the subsequent millions of uninsured aside from "get a job." They didn't have--and still don't have--an answer for healthcare's abominable costs, only part of which will actually be addressed by Obamacare (again, not a great series of laws, just the best one possible (apparently)). They keep flogging free market approaches, cheerfully forgetting that the market is in no way capable of handling healthcare costs. They've got nothing. And they know it. Or they'd have had something substantive to add.

Now we get no government. For anyone or anything except "essential services." No one who matters seems to care about the blind-spots that will impact even the still-operating agencies. Or how the national economy will be impacted.

And then there's the $200 million that the Washington area could lose every day. Whenever you hear someone talk about DC, it's never about the people who live here. These people are abstractions, even the ones who don't work for the federal or city governments. But we feel the impact when spending gets cut, because we all know people getting furloughed, going without paychecks. There's a word for people who threaten livelihoods to prove ideological points. I'd tell it to you straight, but it'll stick better if you figure it out for yourself.

This will almost certainly hurt Republicans in the short and medium terms. And it probably won't affect the Affordable Care Act too badly (it may even give the program a crutch if people can blame any holes on a lack of government). But it's hard for me to care about either of those things right now.

I just want my friends to go back to work.