Krauthammer: GOP Shut Down the Government over Obamacare is Nuts

I don't often agree with Charles Krauthammer on many things - he drinks too much of the GOP Kool-Aid typically - but in a Washington Post editorial he assails the GOP threat to shut down the national government as a means to sabotage Obamacare.  As is now the norm for the GOP on almost every issue, the far right faction in the party has no proposed alternative to the Affordable Health Care Act - or the Senate immigration reform bill either.  They'd rather throw millions of Americans on the trash heap with no insurance coverage and keep America with the highest priced, least effectively delivered health care in the world.  Here are excerpts from the editorial:

A combination of early presidential maneuvering and internal policy debate is feeding yet another iteration of that media perennial: the great Republican crackup. This time it’s tea party insurgents vs. get-along establishment fogies fighting principally over two things: (a) national security and (b) Obamacare.

(a) National security

The more fundamental GOP divide is over foreign aid and other manifestations of our role as the world’s leading power. The Paulites, pining for the splendid isolation of the 19th century, want to leave the world alone on the assumption that it will then leave us alone. 

Which rests on the further assumption that international stability — open sea lanes, free commerce, relative tranquillity — comes naturally, like the air we breathe. If only that were true. Unfortunately, stability is not a matter of grace. It comes about only by Great Power exertion. 

In the 19th century, that meant the British navy, behind whose protection the United States thrived. Today, alas, Britannia rules no waves. World order is maintained by American power and American will. Take that away and you don’t get tranquillity. You get chaos.

(b) Obamacare

 

The other battle is about defunding Obamacare. Led by Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, the GOP insurgents are threatening to shut down the government on Oct. 1 if the stopgap funding bill contains money for Obamacare.

This is nuts. The president will never sign a bill defunding the singular achievement of his presidency. Especially when he has control of the Senate. Especially when, though a narrow 51 percent majority of Americans disapproves of Obamacare, only 36 percent favors repeal. President Obama so knows he’ll win any shutdown showdown that he’s practically goading the Republicans into trying.

Never make a threat on which you are not prepared to deliver. Every fiscal showdown has redounded against the Republicans.

Those who fancy themselves tea party patriots fighting a sold-out cocktail-swilling establishment are demanding yet another cliff dive as a show of principle and manliness. 

But there’s no principle at stake here. This is about tactics. If I thought this would work, I would support it. But I don’t fancy suicide. It has a tendency to be fatal.

As for manliness, the real question here is sanity. Nothing could better revive the fortunes of a failing, flailing, fading Democratic administration than a government shutdown where the president is portrayed as standing up to the GOP on honoring our debts and paying our soldiers in the field.

How many times must we learn the lesson? You can’t govern from one house of Congress. You need to win back the Senate and then the presidency. Shutting down the government is the worst possible way to get there. Indeed, it’s Obama’s fondest hope for a Democratic recovery.

Note how he touches on the issue of sanity.  Sanity is what the GOP has lost thanks to the Christofascists and Tea Party which now control the party base like a metastasizing cancer.