My Old Kentucky Home

No one better summarizes the shutdown impasse than Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman, who moralizes, “We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t even know what that even is.”

How a party irrationally committed to the sabotage of a secret, socialist scheme to make Americans live longer could possibly seem unworthy of respect befuddles Rep. Stutzman. Better that the government remain closed and the Treasury careen towards default while Speaker Boehner figures out what goody bag he can scrape up to appease the Tea Party.

As damaging as they would be, the rational members of society hoped that the kamikaze urgency of the Republican Party would be dashed, as the ultimate evil—electoral defeat—loomed ever-nearer.  Leadership would pull back the lemmings before the political suicide was complete, they thought.

Instead, congressional Republicans are spinning—with remarkably straight faces—an alternate narrative where the shutdown is the consequence of Democratic intransigence and unwillingness to compromise.

Yes, President Obama is somehow guilty of obduracy for not voluntarily repealing his signature achievement because of manufactured preconditions on the other side. It’s as absurd as a blackmailer protesting his victim’s indelicacy for not surrendering with a smile. Even a mugger can empathize that his target might be less than rosy after their rendezvous.

Representative Randy Neugebauer, Republican of Texas, even made the honorable trudge to the World War II memorial, large flag ostentatiously stuffed in his suit pocket, to castigate a park ranger for denying entrance to veterans. “The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves,” the congressman unashamed of shutting down the Park Service said to the low-level employee.

My own representative, Republican Andy Barr of beautiful Lexington, Kentucky, also desperately wants to break into the chutzpah corps. Because I feel obligated to keep up with local politics, or perhaps out of some sort of undiagnosed masochism, I subscribe to Congressman Barr’s weekly emails detailing his various valiant attempts to defund Obamacare or defend Kentucky from the EPA’s “war on coal.”

This week was a little much, however. Embracing the sudden we-are-totally-open-to-compromise Republican talking point, he pens this brazenly Orwellian sentence, “The only way the government would shut down under this scenario would be if President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and their liberal allies continue with their my-way-or-the-highway approach of conditioning funding the rest of the government on rushing the implementation of an unpopular law that will increase health care costs, destroy jobs and drive long-term deficits.”

Never mind that it is literally the Republicans who are conditioning the funding of the government on healthcare—not the other way around. Or that the “rushed implementation” was scheduled since 2010 and has never changed. Or that the Affordable Care Act will not be the economic apocalypse (unlike, say, a first-time default on American debt?).

Yet it gets worse.

“I have voted four times to prevent a shutdown, and in the spirit of Henry Clay, will continue to urge all sides to negotiate and compromise to reach a fair solution,” Barr wrote.

Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser of American politics, who brokered deal after deal during the Nullification Crisis and slavery debates, attempted to keep a country from fracturing apart. Congressman Barr wants the government shut down until the Republican Party’s antidemocratic agenda (having run on—and lost—the presidential election over this issue) can be imposed on the people through the threat of economic catastrophe. The two men could not be more different—either in style or in spirit.

“All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia,” George Orwell wrote presciently in his essay, “Politics and the English Language.”

But my two senators are not ones to let the freshman representative steal the scene. A hot mic caught Senator Rand Paul strategizing to Senator Mitch McConnell that “I just did CNN. I just go over and over again: ‘We’re willing to compromise, we’re willing to negotiate.’”

At least the presidential hopeful recognizes the necessity of breaking just before the brink. McConnell, facing a tough re-election campaign back home in 2014, dove into Orwellian oratory by noting on the Senate floor, “Democrat leaders in Congress finally have their prize — a government shutdown that no one seems to want but them.”

Sigh.

It might be impossible for my representatives in Kentucky, but to the rest of Congress: May the spirit of Henry Clay be with you.

Idrees M. Kahloon '16 is a Crimson editorial writer in Dunster House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays. Follow him on Twitter @ikahloon.