{"id":1382,"date":"2013-10-21T13:20:46","date_gmt":"2013-10-21T18:20:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/napervilledemocrats.org\/ntdo\/?p=1382"},"modified":"2013-10-21T13:21:13","modified_gmt":"2013-10-21T18:21:13","slug":"shutdown-madness-give-gop-a-black-eye-but-are-they-still-winning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/napervilledemocrats.org\/ntdo\/shutdown-madness-give-gop-a-black-eye-but-are-they-still-winning\/","title":{"rendered":"Shutdown Madness Gives GOP a Black Eye, But Are They Still Winning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Closed\"<\/a>The idiocy of the shutdown and flirtation with default has visited some well-deserved bad publicity on the GOP, maybe even endangering<\/a> their “permanent” majority in the House<\/a>. \u00a0But George Packer points out the longer-term dynamics, and they’re not encouraging for those of us who care about real people.<\/p>\n

Our work isn’t done.<\/p>\n

\n

Business As Usual<\/a><\/h2>\n

…<\/p>\n

The government shutdown is over. National default has been averted, for now. According to an estimate by Standard & Poor\u2019s, the Tea Party\u2019s brinkmanship cost the American economy twenty-four billion dollars\u2014more than half a percentage point of quarterly growth. House Republicans have suffered a huge tactical defeat of their own devising, and their approval ratings are at an all-time low. President Obama and the Democrats in Congress appear strong for refusing to give in to blackmail.<\/p>\n

But in a larger sense the Republicans are winning, and have been for the past three years, if not the past thirty. They\u2019re just too blinkered by fantasies of total victory to see it. The shutdown caused havoc for federal workers and the citizens they serve across the country. Parks and museums closed, new cancer patients were locked out of clinical trials, loans to small businesses and rural areas froze, time ran down on implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law, trade talks had to be postponed. All this chaos only brings the government into greater disrepute, and, as Jenny Brown\u2019s colleagues dig their way out of the backlog, they\u2019ll be fielding calls from many more enraged taxpayers. It would be na\u00efve to think that intransigent Republicans don\u2019t regard these consequences of their actions with indifference, if not outright pleasure. Ever since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural, pronounced government to be the problem, elected Republicans have been doing everything possible to make it true.<\/p>\n

These days, Republicans may be losing politically and resorting to increasingly anti-majoritarian means\u2014gerrymandering, filibuster abuse, voter suppression, activist Supreme Court decisions, legislative terrorism\u2014to nullify election results. But on economic-policy matters they are setting the terms. Senator Ted Cruz can be justly described as a demagogic fool, but lately he\u2019s been on the offensive far more than the White House has. The deficit is in fairly precipitous decline, but job growth is anemic, and millions of Americans remain chronically unemployed. Democrats control the White House and the Senate, and last year they won a larger share of the national vote in the House than Republicans did. And yet the dominant argument in Washington is over spending cuts, not over ways to increase economic growth and address acute problems like inequality, poor schools, and infrastructure decay. \u201cThe whole debate over the last couple of weeks is playing against a backdrop of how much to increase austerity, not to invest in the economy,\u201d Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, said last week. \u201cWe are living in a time of government withering on the vine.\u201d<\/p>\n

…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n