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After the Fake Filibuster, a Game of Chicken

The rightwing fringes of the Republican party have been moaning for the past couple of years that candidates like McCain and Romney, despite unstinting support of big business and blustering on about American exceptionalism, simply weren’t conservative enough. The 2012 election cycle brought in a fresh crop of Tea Party-fancying congressional representatives, including the junior senator from Texas, Ted Cruz.

Illustration from the Encyclopedia of Psychiatry under the term "narcissistic personality disorder." Photo by Jonathan Bernstein.

If you recognize his name, that's because he increased his visibility considerably this past week with a "filibuster" on the Senate floor lasting more than 21 hours, claiming that his intention was to bravely fight to defund the Affordable Care Act, known to most as Obamacare.

That was the first step in endlessly awaited health care reform designed to make medical coverage more accessible to more people. It's the one thing that Obama has accomplished, and it seems that no matter how popular it is, Obama's political enemies want to deny him a positive legacy.

As you may know, the federal government runs out of money in mid-October. To stay in business, it must pass what is called a "continuing resolution" (CR, in Beltway-talk), which extends the nonexistent budget. The federal government no longer uses a budget; it sputters along from CR to CR. The next one expires Tuesday, Oct. 1.

Last week the House of Representatives passed a 45-day CR that includes a condition: at the insistence of the Republican majority, funding the government only if the Affordable Care Act is cut off from resources. In other words, the majority of our representatives are willing to shut down the government if Obamacare is not starved of resources. Forget the fact that it's been approved by all three branches of government, including a conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

So the Republicans, who now resemble anarchists, are planning a kind of holdup: they say they won't approve a CR without also killing Obamacare. That in turn could force a government shutdown just as the Sun squares Pluto, setting off the rest of the grand cross -- just as Mercury gets ready to station retrograde.

Friday, the Senate is scheduled to take up the House version of the bill, which will fail in the Democrat-controlled Senate. That means the country will still be without a CR, and the money runs out around Oct. 17. Most people are expecting pressure from the business community, meaning banks and financial markets, not the local tailor shop, to dissuade the Tea Partiers to allow the government to function. But that might not work.

Meanwhile, Republicans -- eager for any influence they might have, and to do anything to make Obama look bad -- have trained their guns on the rapidly approaching debt ceiling deadline. That is the limit on money the government must borrow to pay for things already purchased (wars, etc.).

How Ted Cruz missed the irony of his choice of 'fake filibuster' reading material is a mystery: once the narrator actually tries the green meal, he likes it. Image: MSNBC.

That issue must be resolved by Oct. 17, when the debt ceiling must either be raised -- as has been done more than 50 times in recent decades -- or the U.S. government will be in default on its current financial obligations. Republicans are offering to avert this crisis provided that Democrats will agree to (among other things) approving the Keystone XL pipeline and delaying the implementation of Obamacare for a year.

In other words, the Republican position is: do it our way or we blow the place up. Default would have many repercussions, including messing with financial markets, banking, thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of employees who depend on federal paychecks; not to mention the millions of people who depend on the government being there.

Will the federal government shut down? At this point, it seems unlikely that Congress will manage to get its collective self together and prevent that eventuality by midnight on Monday. Even if it does shut down, various Obamacare provisions will continue to go into effect. 

One thing we can all count on is a bitter fight on the debt ceiling issue as we approach mid-October.

The glaringly obvious fact that emerges from the Cruz performance is that, rather than a good-faith effort to govern, the end game was all about either one guy getting attention, or one guy taking the fall for what a lot of people want to do but don't want to stand up for.