The NYT Sunday provides great reporting on how the GOP developed a detailed plan to invoke this budget crisis just so they could derail Obamacare. Starting with a letter that called for keeping the sequester cuts AND for defunding Obamacare, the GOP has had a scorched earth plan in place to try to get their way for most of this year:
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.
“We felt very strongly at the start of this year that the House needed to use the power of the purse,” said one coalition member, Michael A. Needham, who runs Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation. “At least at Heritage Action, we felt very strongly from the start that this was a fight that we were going to pick.”
Last week the country witnessed the fallout from that strategy: a standoff that has shuttered much of the federal bureaucracy and unsettled the nation.
This puts into better context two things that Democrats have been saying for weeks (and largely ignored by the media): 1) That they’ve already compromised by agreeing to a CR that included the sequester cuts and 2) that they’ve been ready to go to conference to negotiate a budget for 6 months — it is the House GOP who couldn’t be bothered to appoint anyone to the conference committee.
The Koch Brothers, the Heritage Foundation (where Obamacare was born) and their teajhadi minions are spending tons of money on a long planned effort to specifically NOT pass a budget and wait until they could hurt as many Americans as they could to try to get what they couldn’t get in the recent elections. This last week I started hearing a few stories on the highlighting how bad the false equivalence reporting that has been rampant during this shutdown. Maybe this means that the press will shine their light a little harder on the GOP who we know for certain have been waiting (and not doing their own jobs for months) to just shut down the Government to have their Obamacare tantrum.