At The Western Word, Jack Brown, who once worked for Conrad Burns, notes that “Tea Party members like Cruz and Daines are the reason many of us moderates have said, ‘See ya’ to the GOP.”
A Billings Gazette editorial calls on “…Montana’s sole U.S. representative, Steve Daines, to support a “clean” continuing budget resolution so the 12,000 furloughed Montanans can get back to work.”
Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly cautions progressives that the [Republican’s] insanity is not temporary:
So Cruz’s revolt, into which John Boehner and the House Republican Caucus have been dragged because they can’t pass any bill opposed by Democrats without the support of conservatives who agree with his approach, wasn’t some adolescent outburst that will pass like a moment of hormonal rage, but a consistent strategy for using limited leverage on behalf on an extremist agenda. If it’s “insane,” the insanity is not temporary, and won’t just go away.
Arstechnica reports that the “Shutdown of US government websites appears bafflingly arbitrary.” A White House memo (PDF) Arstechnica unearthed contains this gem:
QS: What if the cost of shutting down a website exceeds the cost of maintaining services?
AS: The determination of which services continue during an appropriations lapse is not affected by whether the costs of shutdown exceed the costs of maintaining services.
At Think Progress, Ian Millhiser explains why parliamentary democracies can be better equipped to solve disputes of the shutdown genre than constitutional democracies with elections at fixed intervals.
Balkinization’s Sandy Levinson explains why “Why the coming collaspe of the US government is not (entirely) the fault of our defective Constitution.”
Steve Benen’s “The side of the political divide wearing tin-foil hats” reports a PPP poll’s astonishing findings about the crazy things Republicans (perhaps I should say, crazy Republicans) believe: