Some were shocked when it later emerged that Republicans had been planning to try and stymie recently-elected President Barack Obama before he even placed his fanny on his seat in the Oval Office. Now we see The Sequel: the budget crisis now in play was in effect choreographed by conservatives. It just didn’t organically happen:
Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.
The more you read about it, the more it becomes clear: it was a strategy to push the Republican Party to the right, set up confrontation with the federal government, and defund a program that votes in Congress, the 2012 Presidential election and a Supreme Court ruling had made the law of the land:
“We felt very strongly at the start of this year that the House needed to use the power of the purse,” said one coalition member, Michael A. Needham, who runs Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation. “At least at Heritage Action, we felt very strongly from the start that this was a fight that we were going to pick.”
Last week the country witnessed the fallout from that strategy: a standoff that has shuttered much of the federal bureaucracy and unsettled the nation.
To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.
This suggest that those who insist that when you get down to GOPers will never “really” let the United States default on its debts should think again. Not only is it logical that Republicans will allow a default, but it’s logical they will allow it coupled with a government shutdown at the same time. It truly is an attempt to nullify not just an election, but a Supreme Court ruling even though, as the Times note, conservatives insist the public is on their side. Just as they insisted Mitt Romney would win the election on election day. If nothing else works perfectly, the echo chamber does.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.