In 1995 the government was twice shutdown by the republicans in at attempt to get Bill Clinton to capitulate on the budget.
A couple of unique circumstances intervened to save Clinton from what otherwise might have been an embarrassing and unmitigated disaster.
First, Newt Gingrich, always an egotist and blowhard, made some foolish comments that shifted public opinion. And Bob Dole, running for president in 1996, didn't want to be associated with the stain of revolution and urged a compromise. Gingrich blinked, Clinton won, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Assuming the house is lost this year, as a lot of people seem to think, expect a repeat performance. And just possibly, a different outcome. You can be sure the republicans have studied the 1995 debacle, and won't make the same mistake. And the 2010 bumper crop of fresh wingnuts will be more radical, more ornery, and more inflexible than anything Clinton ever saw.
The healthcare law (and a lot of other stuff) means little if you don't fund it.
A lot of people seem to (mistakenly, in my view) believe that a lot won't change after November. After all, they say, Obama has governed fairly conservatively himself, passing the most conservative possible health overhaul and a stimulus stitched together largely with tax cuts, for starters. Nudging his agenda a little more to the right would hardly be noticed.
And after all, anything radical the house passes (and possibly even a conservative Senate passes as well) would just be vetoed by Obama, the logic goes. We've had gridlock before and it was pretty good.
But the reality is truly frightening. A Republican house takeover, even absent a Senate fall too, would use its subpoena power to endlessly harass democrats, block anything of importance, and shutdown the government until Obama acquiesces. In theory, it might even provoke a constitutional crisis since its likely neither side will blink this time around. For a model of whats to come, just look at California but scale it up to the Congress and the President.
Furthermore, the Senate will be close to divided after the fall election, and while most pundits don't think the republicans will take that one, imagine a 50/50 Senate with Biden as the swing vote. How long before Lieberman, or say Nelson, flips, given that they will also be offered a boatload of cash to go with a juicy chairmanship?
After that, the conservatives need only find a candidate to face Obama in 2012 (fortunately for us, there aren't any obvious choices on the horizon) to engineer a complete takeover. One route is a Tea Party third candidate for presidency. Victory with 33 1/3% of the electorate, more or less.
What shocks me is how despondent and un-fired up democrats are. We are on the verge of a loss of governing power to one of the most idiotic and frightening bunch of idiots in American history, and yet we seem to be at war with ourselves, rearranging the deck-chairs on our ship while the other side bests us in every debate.
Personally, I am more fired up than I was in 2008. Obama's election was one of the happiest days in my life. This Novemeber second may be one of the darkest. The gulf between a McCain presidency vs. an Obama one is small compared to the ocean between a Pelosi led house and a Boehner led one.
If the democrats give away this election to wingnuts because Obama is not liberal enough, it would seem to me to be the moral equivalent of standing in front of the Howler monkey exhibit at the zoo and begging them to fling shit at you until they do it.
The French political philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, said that in a democracy, we get the government we deserve. I guess we will find out November 2.