Place your best guess to the following questions for the chance to win 100 Official Straight dope bragging bucks.
Will there be a government shut down.
If so how long will it last
In the end how will it be resolved.
Will shut out government employees get their salary back
My answers are as follows:
Yes, there is no way PPACA (Obamacare) will go unfunded without a gun to Democrats heads, and everyone knows it. So even the Republicans know that a brinksmanship threat won’t get them what they want. If the threat was all rhetoric, the Republicans would have left themselves with an out, rather than being so explicit about their intentions.
About 3 weeks. Longer than last time because this set of Republicans are more bull headed, but eventually the inconvenience and constant harping of the media will be too much to bear
A coalition of Democrats, moderate Republicans will form a bare majority to continue funding at sequestration levels, and keep Obamacare. Boehner gets tossed out of the speakers post for violating the Hastert Rule, and almost all Republicans not in totally safe districts find themselves unemployed in January 2015.
No, the Federal employees have been a favorite whipping boy for at least a decade. They aren’t seen as real people and anything to make their lives less comfortable gains popular support.
Yes. No one will come from their corners to the center of the ring to make a handshake over a common sense deal to help the American citizen in any way. Because ideaology is inviolate.
2-5 weeks. It’ll take that long for either the Republicans to break because of back-pressure and negative media or the Democrats to get enough pressure from citizens/media to reach out from their corner to bring it to a close.
Most likely, the Republican gambit will fail because they pretend to have the cahones to pull this off, but they don’t really. It won’t cost them their seats, in the long run, but it will drive a lot of their constituents to at least I and some straight to D.
All federal employees such as the president, the Congress, the Federal Courts, and the Pentagon will get their cash money. Everyone else should feel lucky they are getting yanked around. How would they know they were alive if they weren’t?
No, there will not be a shutdown. The GOP have been playing the brinksmanship game since at least 2010, with no shutdown yet. Everyone realizes that no one comes out of a shutdown looking other than horrible. We’ll see continued sequester-level spending and a continued civil service pay freeze, probably through a short-term spending bill that will fuel another shutdown scare in December.
No. They did this once before and ended up paying everyone for taking a couple of days off to christmas shop. My prediction is, they will send home all non-essential personal for leave without pay for a week or so - sort of a mini sequestor. When some members of congress are inconvienced by the absence of the offical toast butteror or the congressional sommelier they will reconsider.
No. I predict this will end the same way that the last four or five showdowns between Obama and Congressional Republicans has ended. Both sides will spend weeks insisting that they won’t make a compromise. Then, late on the very last day, they will reach a compromise. Negotiations will be done behind closed doors, and the final document will avoid resolving the real issues, just like on all the previous occasions.
A minority of Republicans in each house will tire of the foolishness and vote with Dems to extend government funding, without a restriction on Obamacare, for the next two months or so.
I believe a clean bill without defunding will be passed in the Senate and returned to the House. Key players in the House will by then have been ridiculed up, down, right, and left for the latest maneuver, and the House will pass a continuing resolution to maintain current funding until December, when we can do this all again.
There will be accusations of selling out and new plans made to primary the traitors, providing a decent amount of comic relief until then.
Lot of grandstanding, nothing much changes, Republicans back down but declare moral victory, right wing talk show hosts either go along and take full credit or demand Boehner step down.
They shouldn’t since they were oblivious to the recession while the private sector suffered but they probably will due to the furloughs.
No. There’s no real upside for the GOP dying on this hill. It won’t lead to Obamacare getting delayed/canceled, and if it goes on long enough risks the GOP losing seats in what should be a strong mid-term election for them. Boehner knows this, as so will humor the more extreme half of his party for another week and then will pass a bill with Dem votes once the deadline gets near.
My thoughts exactly, Simplicio: a shutdown would kill the Republicans in the mid-term elections next year. If at least some moderate Republicans could make peace with moderate Democrats they might have a chance, next year and in 2016, but not this way. This is political suicide, and the GOP will be blamed if it happens.
How would it kill any GOP chances in the next few years? The central blame is always Obama and his minions by many outspoken GOP elected reps. The debt ceiling, gas prices, Syria, etc., is all on B.O. If they keep up the blame, many peeps would think the sky is certainly falling and vote republican because, um-- because, um, it’s Obama’s fault!
From what I’ve read of Senate procedure, Harry Reid can bring up the House Bill with the defunding language in it and file for cloture on that bill. The GOP would have a hard time with filibustering that, because it’s the bill they want to pass. Assuming there’s 60 votes to proceed (which only requires 5 Republicans), there’s then 30 hours of debate allowed before the bill goes up for a vote. During that time an amendment can be filed to strip the defunding language from the bill. That only needs 50 votes, and can’t be filibustered on its own, as it’s an amendment to a bill that has already passed a cloture vote. The amendment gets over 50 votes, then the amended bill gets over 50 votes, then the Senate and the House have to reconcile their versions.
It seems pretty likely that there’s a majority of the House that’s willing to pass a bill without the defunding language. But that means a lot of Democratic votes. So, it comes down to whether John Boehner is willing to bring the bill up for a vote. I’m kind of hoping it takes a brief shutdown and a strong public outcry against the Republicans before they do so, just because it seems like Boehner’s other strategy for placating his caucus is to promise them a debt ceiling standoff instead, and that would be a very bad idea, and potentially disastrous.
