It was an emergency days ago. Now it's a crisis.
The stories of individual patients being denied treatment because of the House-led shutdown are beginning to seep out.
Michelle Langbehn is a sarcoma patient seeking to enter NIH research trials. Now there aren't going to be any new trials—not until the shutdown ends.
"If I had a message, it would be that lives are at stake. People don’t want to be enrolled because they're doing well. They’re looking because of something that's wrong. For them to have that taken away, it almost makes you want to lose hope in a way. […]
I want to tell them that lives are at stake. This isn't just a matter of inconvenience. This is a matter of life or death. I’m not just doing this for myself. There are 200 people that are trying to get into clinical trials each week. I want to speak for all of us.
The current House Republican plan seems to be to call for re-opening individual subsections of government in direct proportion to how bad the damage is making them look. Reopening the monuments was the first priority, presumably because they could see monuments out their windows and it was a quick trip to set up the necessary press conferences. After it was pointed out that NIH trials were being shut down and patients turned away, a group of House Republicans donned lab coats (no, literally) and said they were all for re-opening that because it is a
damn shame their vote to close the government resulted in the government being closed. Repeat for WIC, though notably less sincerely, and so forth.
But the point is that for every individual victim of the shutdown that gets pointed out, there are tens of thousands that are being impacted. The House premise of reopening token portions of government so as to better be able to ignore the damage being done to the wider population is untenable. No—the sequester was untenable. This is something closer to organized crime. Nice country you've got there, be a real shame if something happened to it.
In a week or so, paychecks to furloughed workers aren't going to arrive. Paychecks to government workers who are still working because they are deemed essential won't be arriving either, because while Congress requires them to work, Congress does not require themselves to pay them for that work. Then bills aren't going to be paid, and mortgage payments aren't going to be made, and people are going to start losing their homes so that the nation's most irresponsible and ideologically obsessed legislative stains do not lose face in their ingenious plan to cease governing at all unless their shifting demands are met. The research is not going to go on, the pay will not be coming, individuals and families will be damaged in irreparable ways, and still Speaker John Boehner will cling to his job with the dedication of a mouldering corpse to his coffin.
Since these people have reached the point of no longer wanting to have a government at all, there's probably little anyone around them can do to convince them. What the endgame here might be, other than the obvious tar and feathers, remains a mystery.