“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus!” Bukowski wrote. “That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.”
The trivialities, in this case, are the GOP’s angry constituents that the party continues to cater to, even at the expense of the rest of the country. On Tuesday, the government shut down — duh — because the Republicans keep trying to dismantle parts of the Affordable Care Act, even though HealthCare.gov went live yesterday. The majority of the country has made it clear they support Obamacare, but that didn’t stop conservatives from attempting to save face by attempting to pass bills that had no chance of being signed by President Barack Obama.
On Tuesday, lawmakers met, but not much has happened. According to The Wall Street Journal, Republicans are criticizing Senate Democrats for being “unwilling to negotiate an end to the standoff,” a standoff which caused furloughs of more than 800,000 federal employees.
According to The Wall Street Journal, “Chris Krueger, a political analyst at Guggenheim Partners, summed up the situation in a research note on Tuesday: ‘There is no evidence to suggest that the federal government will re-open anytime soon as the various factions in Washington remain at odds with one another and themselves.’”
While essential parts of the government will remain employed — air traffic controllers and law enforcement — a large number of federal activities such as the Internal Revenue Service audits, surveillance for flu outbreaks and national parks operations will be suspended. It’s quite the circus, especially considering that the cost of shutting down and re-opening the government is larger than simply allowing the government to continue running. Everyone is upset about the shutdown, and VICE summed up the crux of everyone’s frustrations:
“It’s stupid that a divided, hopelessly inefficient Congress has to approve routine spending every couple of months,” VICE contributor Harry Cheadle wrote. “It’s stupid that that Congress can get held up by a few dozen hardliners who represent an angry minority and can get automatically reelected thanks to gerrymandering; it’s stupid that something so self-evidently stupid as the shutdown is happening because a few politicians have no problem putting a dent in the economy and closing national parks to prove something to their stupid f***ing constituents.”
“As the negotiations progressed (or failed to), journalists on Capitol Hill reported that members of Congress had smelled like booze,” Cheadle wrote. “Can you blame them? If my job was that stupid, I’d be drinking, too.”
With the debt-ceiling issue looming, Congress — well, mostly the GOP — doesn’t have time to waste pandering to a small, angry group of constituents.
So get it together, guys. The National Zoo panda cam depends on it.
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 10/2/2013 under the headline "Congress: You better work, b***h"
