Take one part Republican anti-abortion intransigence:
A pro-life leader in the House says he and many other Republicans will vote against legislation to fund the government through September if a series of anti-abortion riders, which already passed the House, aren't included in the final bill.
Add one part Republican same old, same old:
Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK), John McCain (R-AZ), Jim DeMint (R-SC), John Ensign (R-NV), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) circulated a letter to their colleagues yesterday threatening to place a hold on any bill which does not comply with five very broad criteria. Given some of these senators’ bizarre views about the Constitution, one of their five criteria stands out as a particularly aggressive assault on the Senate’s ability to function.
[...]
[S]everal of the eight signatories to this letter have fairly twisted views of the founding document, believing that the Constitution forbids pretty much everything. Coburn believes that all federal involvement in education — including Pell Grants and federal student loans — violates the Constitution. Paul believes that the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters violates the Constitution (though he walked that comment back). And Sen. Mike “a noun, a verb, and unconstitutional” Lee believes that child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution.
Indeed, it is questionable whether any bill will not be filibustered by one of these radical tenther senators, now that they are promising to obstruct any bill that they personally deem to violate their own idiosyncratic version of the founding document.
And you've got yet another recipe for the government shutdown Republicans continue to insist nobody's talking about, but all based on the apparent willingness of certain members to indulge their "It's All About Me" approaches to governance. On the Senate side, of course, No One Could Have PredictedTM that making a deal on filibusters with Mitch McConnell is not the same thing as making a deal with every Republican (because the real Republican leader is Jim DeMint, not McConnell). And if it wasn't enough that the Senate side will likely kill pretty much every bill there is, there's now the threat from House members to kill all government funding unless government operations are tailored to their personal policy preferences.
Let's see if this impacts the polling numbers on who's to blame for any shutdown.