Enter
full revolt against Boehner’s continuing resolution gambit, that particular jig is up. So Scheiber now
reckons that Boehner has no choice
left but to stop treating the symptoms and fully feed the disease:
Now, don’t get me wrong:
Boehner clearly prefers to
avoid a government shutdown.
He’s spent months figuring out
how to do that, fully aware of
the political debacle it would
entail. Unfortunately, it’s now
clear that the only way he can
induce the political isolation
he typically relies on to prod
his caucus into semi-rational
action is by shutting down the
government and inviting the
public backlash he’s been so
desperate to avoid. Boehner
simply has no other way of
talking sense into his people,
no other hope of making the
House GOP governable. And so,
in the end, a shutdown is in
Boehner’s interest, too.
The hopeful possibility here,
according to Scheiber, is that now
maybe Boehner’s GOP antagonists
will “sober up before we take on
the substantially higher-stakes
proposition of avoiding a debt
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
09.22.13
default.” That would, indeed, be a
welcome occurrence.
But contending against this
possibility are electoral fundamentals. The GOP goes into the
midterm elections with a very
strong hand. The vagaries of redistricting, and the fact that the
bulk of the Democratic base has
sequestered itself into a limited
number of urban districts, means
that there literally might not be
... Boehner has no
choice left but to stop
treating the symptoms
and fully feed the disease.”
enough votes in the right districts
to threaten any of the GOP deadenders. And a government shutdown may not actually be enough
of an apocalypse to alter the underlying electoral plate tectonics.
So there’s a good chance that
Boehner’s plan will simply further tarnish the GOP’s standing,
without providing sufficient motivation to push his colleagues in
a saner direction.
But as Boehner himself has
asked, do you have a better idea?