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Opinion Who Shut Down the Government?
2013.10.07 11:38
Thomas Sowell
Even when it comes to something as basic, and apparently as simple and straightforward, as the question of who shut down the federal government, there are diametrically opposite answers, depending on whether you talk to Democrats or to Republicans.
There is really nothing complicated about the facts. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted all the money required to keep all government activities going - except for ObamaCare.
This is not a matter of opinion. You can check the Congressional Record.
As for the House of Representatives' right to grant or withhold money, that is not a matter of opinion either. You can check the Constitution of the United States. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that Congressmen there have a right to decide whether or not they want to spend money on a particular government activity.
Whether ObamaCare is good, bad or indifferent is a matter of opinion. But it is a matter of fact that members of the House of Representatives have a right to make spending decisions based on their opinion.
But the whole point of having a division of powers within the federal government is that each branch can decide independently what it wants to do or not do, regardless of what the other branches do, when exercising the powers specifically granted to that branch by the Constitution.
The hundreds of thousands of government workers who have been laid off are not idle because the House of Representatives did not vote enough money to pay their salaries or the other expenses of their agencies - unless they are in an agency that would administer ObamaCare.
Since we cannot read minds, we cannot say who - if anybody - "wants to shut down the government." But we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to.
The money voted by the House of Representatives covered everything that the government does, except for ObamaCare.
The Senate chose not to vote to authorize that money to be spent, because it did not include money for ObamaCare. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that he wants a "clean" bill from the House of Representatives, and some in the media keep repeating the word "clean" like a mantra. But what is unclean about not giving Harry Reid everything he wants?
If Senator Reid and President Obama refuse to accept the money required to run the government, because it leaves out the money they want to run ObamaCare, that is their right. But that is also their responsibility.
You cannot blame other people for not giving you everything you want. And it is a fraud to blame them when you refuse to use the money they did vote, even when it is ample to pay for everything else in the government.
When Barack Obama keeps claiming that it is some new outrage for those who control the money to try to change government policy by granting or withholding money, that is simply a bald-faced lie. You can check the history of other examples of "legislation by appropriation" as it used to be called.
Whether legislation by appropriation is a good idea or a bad idea is a matter of opinion. But whether it is both legal and not unprecedented is a matter of fact.
Perhaps the biggest of the big lies is that the government will not be able to pay what it owes on the national debt, creating a danger of default. Tax money keeps coming into the Treasury during the shutdown, and it vastly exceeds the interest that has to be paid on the national debt.
Even if the debt ceiling is not lifted, that only means that government is not allowed to run up new debt. But that does not mean that it is unable to pay the interest on existing debt.
None of this is rocket science. But unless the Republicans get their side of the story out - and articulation has never been their strong suit - the lies will win. More important, the whole country will lose.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM
Comment 2
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김영철*61
2013.10.07 14:19
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운영자
2013.10.07 14:20
Thomas Sowell is a black and is stupid enough to betray his brother, Obama.
He's obviously a puppet of Republican Party. For what and why?
In times of disaster, idiots tend to follow rich and famous, betraying his own people.
I must say that Sowell is one good example of such lunacy.
One thing I know is that the Republicans will betray him behind his back in no time.
Thomas, there's "No soup, 국물" for you in the Republican Party.The Republicans did the exactly same thing to medical doctors in America.
They had promised their support for the medical profession,
but they ridiculed me and us (doctors) behind our back.
If some of us did not realize what happened, then keep supporting Republicans
and you will be rewarded with agony and poverty.
Actually, believe or not, we are about a half way there already.
Obama is trying to give you "peace of mind" in your medical practice
and larger piece of medical pizza pies than insurance companies and medical industries.After all, Obamacare had been legally voted into being by the will of
American people, and it is again affirmed by the Supreme Court of US.
No body can deny Obamacare now !!
Trying to stop Obamacare is not only their sour grapes for not getting
the White House, but also criminal acts in denying the wish of majority of Americans.Our government was shutdown by Republican's dirty sour grapes.
In doing that, they shoot their own feet
and have lost whatever tiny chance they had for regaining the White House.WM
Comment: #2 (against Sowell article)
Comment: #2
Posted by: morgan
Sat Oct 5, 2013 12:38 PM
Sowell says: Since we cannot read minds, we cannot say who if anybody "wants to shut down the government." But we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to.
We don't have to read minds, we can watch the videos of 2010 where the Republican campaign slogan was "we'll shut down the government" or we can read the articles by googling "shut down the gov 2010" and find out which Reps were glad handing each other with that rallying cry.
As to the rest of your preposterous column, two parties--the Senate Democrats and the House Republicans -- each passed divergent budgets earlier this year. The latter, propelled by a very small yet ideologically rigid minority of its members, made the calculated decision from the start not to negotiate.
Democrats made 18 requests since April to go to conference and compromise on a budget bill; Republicans blocked every single one of them. And now they are using a manufactured crisis to extract policy concessions on duly passed legislation they don't like and cannot repeal through the normal democratic processes: elections, legislative votes, and litigation. Republicans now have the votes to end the shutdown immediately by putting a clean resolution on the House floor with no riders or conditions. Such a bill certainly would pass, and 800,000 Americans could return to work tomorrow, but Boehner doesn't do it. All the evidence indicates the GOP intentionally put these workers out of a job by using a historically routine budget resolution to undo the outcome of three lost elections. And they now have the hubris to demand Senate Democrats and President Obama negotiate with that extremist position. As Republicans continually shift the political goal posts ever further to the hard right, negotiating now requires meeting them somewhere between extreme and preposterously irrational. Democrats justifiably have declined to do so here.
This an attempt at extortion from a small fanatical element of the Republican party baggers that was prevented.The issue isn't the immediate or long term effects of govt shut down. Ask any reasonable Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian, the issue is the cancer within the Republican party which none seem to know how or have the will to shut down or deal with and the mudstirring media which continues to give these fanatics airtime or print space..
Comment: #7 (against Sowell article)
Comment: #7
Posted by: morgan
Sun Oct 6, 2013 11:28 AMThe hostage letter House Republicans released brimmed with megalomaniacal ambition. If he wanted to avoid economic ruin, Republicans said, Obama would submit to a delay of health-care reform, tax-rate cuts, enactment of offshore drilling, approval of the Keystone pipeline, deregulation of Wall Street, and Medicare cuts, to name but a few demands. Republicans hardly pretended to believe Obama would accede to the entire list (a set of demands that amounted to the retroactive election of Mitt Romney), but the hubris was startling in and of itself.
The debt ceiling turns out to be an unexploded ordinance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president's powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress's. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic.But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends.
Making enemies of blacks, Latinos, Gays, school teachers, scientists, union members, women, and environmentalists wasn't good enough for Republicans. So now they have found a way to alienate the rest of America too.
God speed in your quest to be the most hated people in the nation.
O'Dumber Care;
What the hell could go wrong?