Are congressional Republicans threatening once again to shut down the government this year unless they get their way on a bunch of pet demands? Over at TNR, Danny Vinik doesn’t think so: “There is no excuse for the news media to inflate the quotes of Republican politicians to make it seem that they are threatening to shut down the government again,” he says. But Brian Beutler thinks Vinik is being too literal. It’s true that no one is explicitly using the word shutdown, but no one ever does. Still, he says, “the threat is clear.”
I’m with Beutler, but not because of any particular parsing of recent Republican threats. It’s because of this:
The truth is practically irrelevant to the question of whether [recent saber rattling] presages a government shutdown fight. Just as it doesn’t really matter whether Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell actually has a government shutdown in mind when he promises to strong-arm Obama next year, or whether he intends to cave.
In either case he’s threatening to use the appropriations process as leverage to extract concessions. That’s a government shutdown fight. And no matter how he plays it, he will unleash forces he and other GOP leaders have proven incapable of restraining. They can’t control the plot.
Yep. It’s just not clear that McConnell has any real leverage over Ted Cruz or that John Boehner has any leverage over Michele Bachmann. Once they implicitly endorse the rider game, they cede control to the wingnuts. And the wingnuts want to shut down the government. Fasten your seatbelts.
