To the Barracades!

That’s what it feels like in Washington these days as Republicans and Democrats hurl abuse, trade blame and hunker down in for aprolonged PR war.

How’s the war going?

Polls showing more Americans are blaming Congressional Republicans for the shutdown.  

At present, the Senate Democrats and the White House are holding fast to their pledge not to negotiate over funding the government.

Republicans are trying a different strategy… demanding that parts of the law be delayed or repealed instead. This way they cast themselves as the reasonable ones, compromising in the face of Democratic intransigence.

Interesting strategy…after all didn’t our civics classes teach us that compromise is the way laws are made in a nation?

True…but…

Not all offers to compromise are legitimate.  Republicans have made an unusually outrageous demand from the start:  defund a law (Affordable Care Act) that was decided on three years ago without theselves having earned the proper electoral mandate to do so.

Jon Steward made an apt comparison of the Republican demands to the currently failing NT Giants football team…imagine the Giants, He says, demanding more points well after the end of the game, or else they’ll shutdown the whole NFL.

Stewart adds:

Thankfully, our professional sports teams are more civil and intelligent than our elected officials

Furthermore if Democrats succumb to such a strategy, Republicans would be emboldened to rewrite other laws every time the government needed funding.

This would essentially give a minority party unrestrained legislative power… despite the fact that the American people gave a majority of the legislative power to Democrats in the 2012 elections by electing a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president.

Thomas L. Friedman put it best in his recent New York Times editorial claiming that the health and legitimacy of our democratic process is at stake in this conflict:

If democracy means anything, it means that, if you are outvoted, you accept the results and prepare for the next election. Republicans are refusing to do that. It shows contempt for the democratic process. President Obama is not defending health care. He’s defending the health of our democracy. Every American who cherishes that should stand with him.

 What do you think? Have Republicans pushed obstruction to the limit, or are Democrats being unreasonable? Let us know in the comments section below!