So the shutdown rolls forward for another day, another week, another ... how long?
It's time to get off the dime. And the way we do that is to move the Overton Window: change the range of debatable outcomes in the direction you want to go. Here's how President Obama can do that.
"My fellow Americans:
The shutdown we see today has effectively nullified the 2011 budget deal Democrats and Republicans negotiated in good faith. You may recall that we got to that 2011 agreement specifically to avoid a government shutdown. And now Republicans have reneged on that deal, by changing a longstanding rule in the House to insure that the shutdown would take place, and by refusing to even take a vote on the Senate proposal to end the shutdown, because they know it would pass if they voted on it.
That being the case, with Republicans reneging on their 2011 deal, we Democrats have no choice. We must declare that the 2011 deal is dead, and any new negotiations must start from that point. Our Democratic position is now back to where it was in 2011, in which we propose not just to end the shutdown, but to end the sequester, to eliminate the debt ceiling, and to go back to our originally proposed Democratic budget from that year, which would increase the Federal budget to $1.2 trillion per year.
That's our position. That is what we want. And that is what we will push for in any negotiations."
Did you hear that? It's the sound of the Overton Window being shoved to the left.
And at the end of the day, what we're probably going to get out of this is something a lot like the Senate clean CR. But the Repubs can claim "victory" because they avoided giving the Dems what they wanted.