c-no said:
Bgheff said:
The funny part is the health care plan goes into effect and will be paid for regardless of the shutdown. It accomplishes nothing other than a "fuck you" from the teaparty Reppublicans.
I honestly didn't pay much attention to Obamacare other than knowing the very basic thing about it (being insurance or something) but to hear that it will pass regardless makes me want to see the Tea Party Republicans quit their tantrum towards it. Still, I wonder, is it all on the Republicans or this also in some way the Democrats fault as well. I don't pay much attention to politics nor do I like it so I apologize for my ignorance.
It's a mutual pissing contest. The Republicans won't pass an appropriations resolution that funds the ACA. The Democrats won't pass any partial appropriations resolutions unless ACA is fully funded.
This isn't the first time that there's been an attempt to defund a law to prevent its enactment. I'm sure it won't be the last. It's not a common tactic, but it is for example why the border fence was never finished.
Likewise, make no mistake that this is actually about passing a budget. We haven't had a budget in four and a half years, and this isn't about one, it's about another continuing resolution for spending.
Personally, I think obamacare is an enormous clusterfuck. Not that the insurance situation wasn't a clusterfuck to begin with, as the nation moved long ago from insurance being catastrophe coverage to coverage for basic care (which is on its face absurd), but my overall impression is that the law is either the biggest pile of incompetent horseshit ever to pass through congress (and that's saying something) or a well-crafted, subtle method of crashing the system to force a single-payer system into place.
I can't fault the Rs for trying to defund it, but I don't think their intentions are pure. It's all about "optics," to use the Washington word for propaganda. Obamacare isn't very popular anymore. If the Republicans make a big show of defunding it, it's likely to win them some votes in 2014. I can't fault the Ds for fighting so hard for it either. It's their baby, it's the sole legacy of the Obama presidency that has any measure of support as far as I can tell. If they let it go, they might lose some of their entitlement voters, and they'll certainly lose a big chunk of their control.
That's really what both parties are fighting for: control. They're perfectly fine cooperating on things that give them both more grip on the populace, but while they are both big-government statist parties at their core, they naturally disagree on some level, and that's where this gigantic dick-measuring comes in.
In the end, it doesn't matter so much. We're talking about spending money we don't have either way. With a national debt nearing $17,000,000,000,000 we're so far in the realm of funny money and fucked-ness that we might as well not care anymore. Hell, give every US resident a hundred thousand dollars from thin air to spend on healthcare and we're still in the same order of magnitude in the hole.
