Closed minds close government

The spirit of democracy is a sense of compromise - one of the reasons for the failure of democracy to take root in Russia in the early 1990s was that civil society was weak and elected politicians did not appreciate that give-and-take is needed.  Now, Republicans who wish to destroy every success Barack Obama has achieved simply because he is a Democrat, are forcing a government shutdown.  They will only pass a budget bill -  a routine motion in normal times - if the Affordable Care Act is delayed or destroyed.  Because they resent poor people having access to healthcare, they will harm American economic health.   Like Nero (apocryphally), they will fiddle while America burns.

Bizarrely, The Telegraph spins it that the Democrats rejected the plan to avert a government shutdown, but much of Telegraph reporting in the USA is in thrall to the extremist Tea Party.  Why should the Democrats in the Senate remove what they have been trying to achieve for decades and would be vetoed by the White House, even if they did so?  Even if the Democrats crumbled (not unheard of), the GOP would be back at the next negotiations in November with a fresh set of demands.  It would be the tail wagging the dog.

What the Republicans cannot understand is that they lost the 2012 election - they lost the battle for the White House, they failed to reclaim the Senate and their number of seats in the House of Representatives fell from their 2010 surge.  The House Speaker, John Boehner, who resembles a pope in the 17th or 18th centuries i.e. everyone ignores his strictures and so has to fall in line with those he is supposed to corral, is attempting to boost his weak position by saying any budget bill must be passed by a majority of House Republicans rather than reaching across to House Democrats, but instead has made himself a creature of the Tea Party, like the popes of the 14th century were dominated by French kings.  It is astonishing that he would become president if both Obama and Joe Biden were incapacitated.

Obama has no need to move from his position, the benefits of not having to seek re-election, unlike in 2011 when he made concessions and it is better to emerge the victor from when the government runs out of money than leave it festering when the actual country runs out of money two weeks later.  He didn't blink when the Republicans refused to compromise and so enacted sequestration.  Moreover, despite The Telegraph, it should be fairly easy to pin it on the Republicans and their mania to kill ObamaCare, who were punished electorally when they shut down government in the mid-1990s.  Regaining the House must be a Democrat target certainly.