Shut 'em Down!

The argument is that the smaller, more technically savvy firms might be great at designing the required infrastructure, but not great at navigating the legal environment to secure the contracts. And vice versa.

Looks like Obama has proven smarter once again, rejecting Boehner and sending him back to his etch a sketch.

Dude, in all seriousness seeing your Boehner for Obama is about as sickening to see Nauses hatred for Obama. You two should get hitched.

In all seriousness, I dont care about your problems.

Omnibus spending bills should be made illegal; it avoids all future ridiculousness like this.

Every year every single government department should be reviewed and their budgets should be decided individually and voted on separately. How can an ineffective program every be defunded if they are all lumped together with a vote for everything or a vote for nothing.? It is insane. No matter your feeling on the central issue in this budget shutdown, Obamacare, you have to see the insanity of this budget process. Baseline budgeting is absurd. All up or all down is HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE. No one is accountable for their vote on any particular program. One side can't agree to shut down the government because one program will not be funded. One side cannot shut down the government because one program will be funded. Omnibus spending bills are only good for politicians because it gives them all cover and allows their voted to be for sale with political kickbacks.

If they vote yes or no on a departments budget, they are accountable to their voters and it's all out in the open.

If both sides would look at the facts and not bicker over their interpretations of them, you'd have a point. It would be more effective to have a body that would evaluate each program based on solid metrics and give it a score. Something to the effect of cost/reward, liability, public opinion, efficacy, and impact. Then let the politicians decide what level of programs they are willing to support without knowing what those scores are. It would eliminate partisan hogwash and neuter lobbyists.

We have a lot of programs that are great PR machines, something to talk about in a stump speech, but have been shown repeatedly to have no appreciable impact. Programs like headstart have a relatively short effectiveness with kids who go on to public schools. But you'll never get a politician to admit the program is a waste of taxpayer money and would be far more effective as a private enterprise because of the stigma of defunding any kind of education.

Take it a step further and extend it to legislation as a whole. There are bills that get passed that are called one thing so they sound nice to the public, do something completely different and then have a whole bunch of completely unrelated crap tacked onto it. Often we'll see those addendums tacked on just to make sure the bill can't pass.
"Oh look, party X voted against the 'Protecting children from child molesters' bill".
What we don't see is that the bill in question also contained stuff that would make small businesses illegal and completely dismantle food industry regulations on every level. That's not a smart bill, but the label sounded nice and so they play political games rather than getting ***done.

You want to do X, you put together a bill to do X. YOu don't put together a bill to do Y and then sneak in X on top of it.

The whole damn system is broken and I have zero confidence in its ability to be corrected from within the system itself. :(

Aside from the PR crap, that's the way the system is designed to work. The problem is that partisan squabbles weren't part of the design. Riders are a useful tool for fast-tracking time sensitive legislation that isn't controversial. The founding fathers designed our representative democracy under the assumption that future representatives would be real statesmen like them. They never foresaw the way that short-sighted party politics would eclipse the greater needs of the people. And they wouldn't have believed that the populous would become nothing more than a bunch of disengaged complacent fat cows.

Not entirely on point, but the fed is audited every year, and doesn't get an unqualified audit specifically due to two departments, DoD and DoHS.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/18/gao-audit-federal-government-defense_n_2507097.html

House GOP changed the rules of opening the government from the shutdown at the 11th hour, just prior to the shutdown. Take the time to watch these monkey antics about HR 368. Which states that only the Majority of the House or their designee can motion resolutions from the Senate to reopen the government.

We didn't want to shut down the government, we only spent half of the campaign season talking about it and changed the rules last minute to ensure we could shut it down and keep it shut down.

Thanks Obama!

And the Senate won't fund the government unless Obamacare is funded whoop dee doo. The Senate won't even allow a vote on the Bill that passed the House to fund the national parks with zero strings attached. The Senate says, you get Obamacare or you get nothing.

The government would be funded this very day if the Senate would fund it, but they will not. The rational solution is to fund the government then work on funding Obamacare separately as that is the only holdup. It is the right of the House to defund any program if it is voted on and passed. If they choose to do that to a popular program then the voters will hold them accountable. But because they do the Senate shouldn't hold the rest of government funding hostage. That isn't a Republic that is tyranny.

Do you deny though that the Senate will not fund anything and will keep the government shut down unless Obamacare is funded?

Except that members of the senate can call a bill for a vote and aren't because they know it won't pass. Members of the House are no longer allowed to do so, even though it would pass. They also didn't change the rules or attempt to defund a program they didn't like. I'd like to see a senate bill defunding ACA but also defunding farm subsidies, oil subsidies, and a constitutional amendment to reverse the citizens united decision. See how fast the Neo-cons forget about ACA.

That SHOULD make the tea party happy if they actually give a crap about pork, but they don't, it's a political game by an organization founded and funded by the richest people in America to be the publicly popular arm of their own interests.

Well you are changing the subject aren't you? Deflection.

Not in the slightest. You want to play the reversal and blame the senate for not funding the government, except it's apples and oranges.

How many times do you need to be told that Obamacare is already funded?

And the bill that passed the House removes the funding but funds everything else in the government.

So are you denying that the Senate will not fund the government unless Obamacare is also funded?

The basis of representative democracy is that elected officials share the powers of legislation. That means that it ceases to be any form of democracy when members are silenced. Who's the tyrant?

Harry Reid

Obamacare is funded, period. This belief that you have that the budget is required to fund Obamacare is totally 100% inaccurate. The House cannot "fund" Obamacare, they have no control over it. They can only defund it, which they have tried to do over 45 times, and have failed over 45 times, and will continue to fail for..a very long time. These are indisputable facts that the tea party and their supporters just cannot get over. It was very amusing, until they decided to shut down the gov't, which has accomplished nothing.

Have you seen one of the House bills come up for debate in the Senate? No. Have you seen regular order on any bill that came out of the House? No. Harry Reid tables them all.

learn civics

Once again, the republicans in the senate have the ability to call those bills to the floor, but haven't, because they won't pass and it undermines the whole point of this show: to make the dems look like *** if they don't defund ACA.

Reid isn't denying the senate minority the ability to vote on the house bills.

You're so blind to anything that doesn't support your incredibly narrow regurgitation, it's sickening.

The public isn't falling for the 'We shut down the government but it's really the Dem's fault' *** so the rhetoric is becoming more and more desperate.

Blame Obama and Reid as much as you want, the only person thats in real danger of losing their job is Boehner. Its almost impossible to find a scenario where he holds onto his speakership, now that he has officially been dismissed as irrelevant to the process by Obama, the Senate, and the GOP. He spent the whole week saying he was making progress and Paul Ryan was stepping up and "shifting the tone" of the talks, only to offer a *** proposal to extend the debt ceiling until the holidays and...just leave the gov't closed indefinitely. Seriously, no plan to re-open the gov't and put the 800k people back to work. Kudos to Obama for kicking him out of the WH and into the mud where he belongs. Now the House gets to sit on the sideline while the Senate comes up with a bipartisan deal, enjoy that tea party. Idiots.

learn political science, you need it.

Every going to answer this instead of pretending to be "sickened"?

So are you denying that the Senate will not fund the government unless Obamacare is also funded?

politics does not equal civics. Political science is the art of manipulating people.