Is the mounting speculation over an unavoidable government shutdown merely a mounting indication of an imminent deal?
When so much dark harmony reigns among the Beltway's pundits and pols, we should probably resort to the kind of perverse cynicism that assumes brighter days ahead. I don't trust unanimity in Washington, and it's a prodigious unanimity we're enduring: Doom, there's nothing but doom ahead, folks, and all the result of that other guy.
Generally, for each guy there's at least some forensic evidence of the "other guy" argument. But not this time. The budget dispute, to frame it modestly, is as one-sided as disputes come, which makes it more of a tantrum than a dispute. And the sheer irrationality of the tantrum is so unimpeachably evident -- the fitful rejection of an exacting, split-the-difference compromise on spending cuts, coupled with a widespread government shutdown over the fiscal insignificancies of National Public Radio or Planned Parenthood -- that even the enablers are now marooning the instigators.
Initially, there was a corresponding dispute over which partisan side would more greatly suffer from a shutdown, yet that dispute, too, seems to have gone the way of the polemical platypus -- it's now less a primal dispute than a towering consensus that Republicans, alone, are on the exceptionally bad public-relations hook.
From the NY Times' editorial this morning -- "Speaker John Boehner knows the public is likely to blame Republicans for the pain of a shutdown" -- to Politico's straight-up coverage -- "Republicans are nervous about appearing intransigent under a barrage of Democratic attacks contending the GOP’s tea party wing is making 'extreme' demands" -- there's something of a concerted given out there that Republicans' customary unity is fragmenting beyond all expectations.
When, for instance, a Republican senator (a moderate, to be sure, but still, a Republican) can be found to venture that "we all would suffer" from a shutdown, one's universal spin-translator need not work overtime to spit out: "We, and we alone, are screwed."
Boehner "gets it," I'm sure the shrewd Mitch McConnell gets it, and even the hideously duplicitous Eric Cantor, I suspect, gets it. They all get it, deep down, where future House and Senate seats are politically calculated -- and to this cynical crowd, the politics of "it" are all that matter.
Indeed, their cynicism rivals even mine, which, the more it observes the former's, anticipates a "surprise" budget deal.