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Welcome everyone to our year-end awards columns! Every year, we pre-empt our normal "Friday Talking Points" columns for two weeks, in order to take a look back at the year that was.
The Obama administration just rolled out what could be called "version 1.1" of HealthCare.gov, the website set up as a health insurance exchange for Americans who live in states which didn't set up their own state-level exchanges. In the computer world, "version 1.1" normally means "the first bug-fix version" of a piece of software. After two months of nothing short of disaster, the White House is now confident that the website is ready for prime time. Mostly.
Welcome to our planet. Sorry that your saucer landed in the U.S. during our messy debt ceiling crisis. I'm happy to answer the questions it prompted you to ask. First: "Is America exceptional among Earth countries in how it funds government?" Yes, the United States operates very differently from most countries that we call democracies. Except for little Denmark, no other democracy has a "debt ceiling." Indeed, no other industrialized country on Earth limits how much the government can borrow and owe.
Yesterday, the citizens of five counties in eastern Colorado voted to "pursue becoming the 51st state." While seceding was on the ballot in a total of eleven counties, six wound up voting the notion down. But Washington, Phillips, Yuma, Kit Carson and Cheyenne counties all approved the measure. The chances of East Colorado becoming a new state are pretty slim, but maybe there's another answer to their pleas for autonomy.
I was too busy to write today because I was doing my taxes. "But Chris," I hear you ask, "isn't April 15th supposed to be Tax Day?" Well, yes... yes it is. But October 15th is the new official "Tax Day For Lazy Procrastinators." It used to be August 15th, but at some point Congress apparently decided that wasn't quite lazy enough for some American taxpayers, so they gave us two extra months.
Will Republicans go the way of the Whig Party? Well, we're not really going to answer that question in any meaningful way today, we're going to instead focus on the question itself. Because this question isn't really all that apt a parallel to draw in the first place. Most people today just use "go the way of the Whig Party" as an amusing way to say "disappear as a national political party." But a truer parallel to history would be to ask the question: "Will today's Republicans revert back to being the Whig Party?" Or, perhaps: "Will the Tea Party eventually go the way of the Whig Party?"
Today we start in June and bring the timeline of Republican obstructionism on the budget negotiations they are now loudly demanding right up to the present. Both of these articles are provided as a public service, in the hopes that the mainstream media won't continue to completely ignore what happened previously during 2013, when discussing the current situation in Washington.
So, as a public service, I'd like to trace the history of the Republican Party when it comes to budget negotiations. In a nutshell, if you don't have time to read all the clips below, the Republican Party has been howling for years that Congress should follow the "regular order" when it comes to passing budgets. This regular order is: House passes budget. Senate passes budget. Conference committee hashes out compromise budget. House and Senate pass compromise budget. President signs budget.
I've been saying for approximately a year now that the Republican Party is engaging in an increasingly-escalating civil war amongst themselves. For a long time, this intraparty struggle was really only visible to those who pay very close attention to politics. But now the American public at large is seeing what the wonks have been watching for months, because it really is impossible to ignore the magnitude of the Republican government shutdown and the looming default of the full faith and credit of the United States of America. As we enter the second week of what could be called "The War Between The Republicans," it's going to become more and more evident that Republicans truly have no idea what they want out of their manufactured crisis, and that the voices of sanity within the party (such as they are) are upping the pressure on John Boehner to find a way out -- any way out -- of this mess.
The article below was written in June of 2009, when the public option was still fiercely being debated and the outcome of the health reform effort was not in any way guaranteed (or even, really, in sight -- "Obamacare" wouldn't pass until the following year). Somewhere in my research, I stumbled across what can be said to be Ronald Reagan's first foray into the world of politics.