The US Government Shut Down Because Everything Is Stupid
At midnight last night, the federal government shut down because Congress couldn’t get its shit together. Explaining that to people from other countries, or Americans who don’t pay attention to the daily grinding and wailing from Washington, DC, is very difficult—when you talk about the shutdown, it’s hard to avoid sounding like a small child trying to communicate the rules of a game that you and your friends invented as you went along.Wait, you realize as you’re launching into an explanation of Ted Cruz’s filibuster, none of this really makes sense, does it?
To recap: Republicans hate Obamacare. Some of them—the hard-right, perpetually angry Tea Party types who are mostly in the House of Representatives—hate it so much that they’re refusing to pass a routine continuing resolution (CR) to fund the federal government’s normal operations unless Obamacare isn’t funded. Since Republicans control the House (and there are enough in the defund-Obamacare caucus for their opinions to really count—we’ll get to that), they can do this if they want. Yesterday, House Republicans continued to pass bills that dismantled parts of Obamacare even though they had no chance of passing the Senate or getting signed by president Obama.