(The cartoon above is by John Cole in the Scranton Times-Tribune.)A few days ago, it looked like the congressional Democrats had once again come near a deadline and folded (like they have too many times in the past). They had wanted to do away with the sequester cuts to the federal budget, because that austerity program was hurting the economy and stifling recovery. Once again the Democrats called for bipartisanship and begged the Republicans to negotiate a fair compromise. And once again, as they have so many times in the past five years, the Republicans refused to even consider compromise.
So, as the deadline for passing a continuing resolution to keep the government funded neared, the Democrats folded. They agreed to continue that funding at the sequestration level. The Republicans had won again. They could have taken that victory back to their teabagger base and bragged about it, but they got greedy. The victory was so easy that they became convinced they could squeeze even more out of the Democrats.
But then the Republicans overreached. They got too bold in their naked greed, and demanded the one thing the Democrats could not give them -- the destruction of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). They wanted to destroy the signature accomplishment of the Obama administration. So the House Republicans sent the Senate a continuing resolution that completely defunded Obamacare.
But with their backs to the wall, the Democrats found their backbone. They stripped the defunding of Obamacare out of the resolution and sent it back to the House. That was the only thing the Senate Democrats could do, since agreeing to destroy Obamacare was unthinkable. The Republicans should have known that's what would happen, but they were drunk with power and deluded by past victories -- and the Democratic action shocked them. Now the Republicans' blunder put them on the defensive. They could not retreat without angering their own party base, but found themselves in a fight they could not win.
They tried again. Instead of defunding Obamacare completely, they added an amendment to the continuing resolution that would just delay the implementation of Obamacare for a year. But the Democrats were having none of it. Senate Democrats realized that the Republican blunder had given them the edge in power, and they once again stripped the amendment out of the resolution and sent it back to the House.
Now the Republicans got desperate. They realized they had thrown away their victory, but couldn't retreat. So they sent a third continuing resolution to the Senate -- this time asking that only Obamacare's individual mandate be delayed for a year. It took Senate Democrats less than an hour to deal with that -- stripping the offending amendment out and returning the resolution back to the House. Then, as a last ditch effort to save face, the House Republicans asked for a conference committee to negotiate a "solution".
But the Senate Democrats quickly rejected that. They had already compromised as much as they could by agreeing to the sequestration level of funding, and they weren't about to "negotiate" any kind of damage to Obamacare. So the government was shut down, and the entire nation could see it was Republican intransigence that caused it.
Now the Republicans are left with trying to save face by passing small pieces of government funding. But that won't work either. The GOP finds itself being rightly blamed by the public for shutting down the government. They have put themselves between a rock and a hard place -- because they will have to give in sooner or later or risk damaging their party further next year in the general election. But when they do they will anger the teabaggers and might not survive a party primary. As the old saying goes, the GOP has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Now the Democrats are in the position of power. And if they're smart, they will demand the Republicans fold not only on the funding of government, but also on raising the debt ceiling. It would make no sense to get the government funded only to let the Republicans repeat this hideous exercise in a couple of weeks by trying again to hold the nation hostage on the debt ceiling issue.
I have read some articles saying the Republicans got outsmarted by Majority Leader Reid. That's just not true. The Republicans did this to themselves. They took a victory and turned it into a humiliating defeat.
