October 4, 2013
Shutdown: GOP extortion
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A Los Angeles Times editorial was captioned: "The GOP's shutdown sham. Republicans are holding the government hostage in their battle against healthcare reform." The paper added:

"The inconvenient truth for the GOP is that 'defunding Obamacare,' as the House tried to do, wouldn't stop most of the major provisions of the healthcare law, some of which have already gone into effect. That's because the new insurance rules, premium subsidies and many other features of the law don't rely on discretionary dollars; they're on fiscal autopilot .... It's just a desperate attempt to score political points against the Affordable Care Act before it goes fully into effect and the benefits become clearer."

Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: "The high cost of ideological extremism was on full display in Washington this week, where a radical faction of the Republican Party forced a government shutdown."

Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin wrote in Thursday's New York Times:

"The government shutdown is the work of the so-called kamikaze caucus of about 40 Tea Party Republicans in the House .... Moderate Republican voters, governors and financial backers will be horrified if the present confrontation leads to a constitutional crisis or global economic meltdown, but they have scant influence over the radicals in the Tea Party caucus."

Ironically, the ACA now drawing blind GOP hatred was copied directly from Republican Mitt Romney's model in Massachusetts, which relies on commercial insurers instead of government-provided coverage. Why did the party flip-flop?

As we noted Friday, it's disgusting that West Virginia's two Republicans in Congress, Shelley Capito and David McKinley, joined the GOP attempt to strip health insurance from 30 million "working poor" Americans. They brought shame to the Mountain State, which has an abundance of working poor people.

We can't guess the outcome of the current national nightmare. It's a tragedy for America.

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