Clippings

Shutdown Commentary

At The New Yorker, Amy Davidson writes about The GOP's Emergency-Room Politics

They are doing the same thing with their basic legislative responsibilities; they are the little men in the distant office, sending out letter after letter: deny, deny, deny. Obamacare might at least make that type rarer in the health-care system. When are we going to remake our politics?

Also at the The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert broadens the argument somewhat in Lost in the Denialosphere: Climate Change, Obamacare, and the Repeal of Reality
It seems oddly appropriate that a report warning that the time to move on climate change is today (yesterday, really) should arrive in the nation’s capital just as the government was preparing to shut down. Nothing signals inaction quite so eloquently as barricades around the Jefferson Memorial. The proximate cause of the shutdown is the refusal of the Republican-led House to continue financing the government unless Democrats agree to delay (or gut) Obamacare. But the deeper cause might be said to be the same kind of fairy-tale thinking that animates the N.I.P.C.C. Shuttering the government is a dumb idea under pretty much any circumstances. Still, the objections that Republicans in Congress raise to the health-care law might be worth considering if they bore any relationship to the law in question. Rarely do they.
And while we've got climate change on the table


Returning to a theme first sounded yesterday


The events on Capitol Hill prompted Blake Hounshell to ask a question I wish we heard considered more often and more seriously


Via @TheDailyBeast, Lawrence Lessig makes another point that needs to be considered more seriously

But freedom is different from responsibility. And the real question that Republicans need to be asking their party leadership is whether this is the kind of government that Americans should want.