Before I dive into bad and/or strange news, we should all take a moment to reflect on a basic victory this week: we have a government!
Perhaps celebrating our continued governance is setting a low bar, but these days I take what I can get. Also, I know lots of us were very excited for a shutdown, although we couched this excitement in euphemistic phrasing like “I’m interested to see what anarchy looks like” and “I’ve personally always found trash collection overrated” and “will we have to feed the animals at the National Zoo ourselves?”
(Okay, that last one was me, and it turns out that in the event of a shutdown the pandas and cheetahs and such are still taken care of. Notably, the same is not true of military families.)
Admittedly the road to continued governance was rocky. For a while it seemed pretty certain we’d face at least a few days of quasi-anarchy, and for some reason most major news outlets covered this through the lens of disappointed tourists.
“They need to get their acts together and get stuff done,” opined Tracy Hickey, a school speech therapist visiting DC from South Bend, Indiana, and the official mouthpiece for Frustrated Everyday Americans Who Just Want A Reasonable Government. And none other than the Washington Post played hardball with crestfallen 7-year-old Charlie Giambrone of Erie, PA, forcing him to concede that “I helped with the budget so I could come [to DC] today.”
To be fair, tourists are basically the gray squirrels of DC reportage. They are everywhere; they are fidgety and obnoxious; and their potent combination of enthusiasm, naivety, and crankiness makes them kind of fascinating (and endlessly quotable).
But spoiled vacations were not the only factor in play here. As everyone knows by now, the budget battle came down to Republicans holding Planned Parenthood hostage, thinking that because Americans disapprove of it (they don’t) it’d be a good bargaining chip (it wasn’t) and Republicans would seem sensible and virtuous (they didn’t, and they aren’t, and they never will be).
The selling point was supposed to be that the federal government shouldn’t provide money for abortions, but since it hasn’t been legally permitted to do so for 35 years, the argument fell flat. It turns out that withholding Planned Parenthood funding would simply deny millions of women low-cost, life-saving cancer screenings.
So this was not a PR slam-dunk for Republicans. They did, however, manage to add about $8 billion worth of cuts to the Democrats’ $30ish billion proposal. Republicans sold this as a compromise, even though their initial proposal was also around $30 billion and only became $60 billion when Tea Party freshmen hijacked the process.
It’s worth noting that there’s a good chance this type of budget cutting will be utterly useless and could throw our economy into greater disarray. But who cares? As usual, this had little to do with actual economics and more to do with the culture wars. Luckily, the Democrats held their ground and called the Republicans on their nonsense, but (pro-states’ rights, pro-individual liberty) conservatives still succeeded in slashing DC’s public funding of abortion.
So it could be worse. You could be a tourist who came to DC for a visit to the monuments and a free abortion. Then you’d really be out of luck.
Anyway, the sad truth is that all of this pales in comparison to the coming battle over the real budget, which was just proposed by Paul Ryan and which is really, really awful for lots of reasons we won’t have to think about for at least another week.
Instead, let’s focus on some other riveting news: Michele Bachmann is definitely running for president! This could never happen if we didn’t have a government, but I will let you decide exactly how you feel about that. I suspect we’ve all known about Bachmann’s candidacy for some time, but the dream is quickly becoming reality as the congresswoman romps around Iowa, stalking voters and shucking corn and talking about fertility.
“Democrats…have declared war on marriage, on families, on fertility, and on faith,” Bachmann said recently. She should probably calm down; the Democrats’ mandatory chemical castration bill does not stand a good chance of making it out of committee.
Still, the faux-family values thing has played well among conservatives in Iowa since their “black-robed masters”–Bachmann’s words–on the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal a few years back. Because the state hasn’t been absorbed into hell or descended into chaos and sin (yet), it’s up to evangelicals like Bachmann to carry the outrage torch. This strategy might be effective in, say, an Iowan caucus, but it’s unclear whether mainstream Republicans are looking for virulent homophobia as a defining feature of their chosen candidate.
Again: if we could only shut down the government indefinitely, there would be no race, none of this would matter, and Bachmann would be out of a job. Anarchy, anyone?