I don’t expect any breakthroughs today. However, there are a number of news stories out saying that (1) the GOP is hemorrhaging support in the polls; and (2) the establishment GOP has had it up to here with the baggers.

My question is, does the establishment have a base any more? Or has the Tea Party eaten it?

Ron Brownstein wrote,

The reason the most confrontational congressional Republicans have seized the party’s controls is that they are most directly channeling the bottomless alienation coursing through much of the GOP’s base. That doesn’t mean Republican voters have broadly endorsed the party’s specific tactics: In this week’s United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, even GOP voters split fairly closely on the wisdom of seeking concessions on President Obama’s health care law through the debt and spending showdowns (while almost every other group preponderantly opposed that idea).

But the kamikaze caucus, by seeking to block the president by any means necessary, is reflecting the back-to-the wall desperation evident among grassroots Republicans convinced that Obama and his urbanized, racially diverse supporters are transforming America into something unrecognizable. Although those voters are split over whether the current tactics will work, they are united in resisting any accommodation with Obama.

Overlooking some of the both-sides-do-it framing, what the article says is that the GOP’s white, aging base is obsessed with the belief that “big government” amounts to their tax money paying for cushy benefits for the less deserving (i.e, not white). They honestly believe that the Democratic Party gains votes by getting minorities dependent on government handouts that white people don’t get.

Those findings suggest that the real fight under way isn’t primarily about the size of government but rather who benefits from it. The frenzied push from House Republicans to derail Obamacare, shelve immigration reform, and slash food stamps all point toward a steadily escalating confrontation between a Republican coalition revolving around older whites and a Democratic coalition anchored on the burgeoning population of younger nonwhites. Unless the former recognizes its self-interest in uplifting the latter—the future workforce that will fund entitlements for the elderly—even today’s titanic budget battle may be remembered as only an early skirmish in a generation-long siege between the brown and the gray.

The joke is, of course, that a whole lot of white people depend on those “entitlements,” too, and not just Social Security and Medicare.

However, judging by current poll numbers, the hard-core baggers are not by themselves a big enough group to keep Republicans in Washington. With congressional district gerrymandering and deep pocket donors the GOP isn’t going to disappear. They’ll likely keep control of the House for a while. But unless the party can make a significant course change to broaden its base, the 2010 midterms may have been their last hurrah for, well, a long time to come.

Maybe forever? The actual death of a major party is not something that happens often, and I’ll believe it when I see it. But for the end-is-nigh arguments, see John Judis and Elias Isquith.

Yesterday some Republicans saw the handwriting on the wall, or at least in the polls, and realized that the shutdown/debt ceiling grandstanding is hurting them a lot more than it is hurting the Dems. So many are backing off the “kill Obamacare” fight.

So what now? Brian Beutler thinks they’re about to make things even worse for themselves

Republican leaders want to phase out the fight by changing the terms and terrain. And their new targets are — wait for it — Medicare and Social Security. See this Op-Ed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., in which he mentions Obamacare precisely zero times, and argues instead that Congress’ central focus should be cutting much more popular, durable programs. He even names a couple of specific Medicare adjustments Democrats might support, but only in a plan that includes new tax revenues. Guess how many times the word “revenues” appears in the piece.

This is not the battle you want to pick if your electoral imperatives require you to pander to white voters. Maybe in the days ahead, once the government is reopened and the risk of immediate default has passed, Republicans will walk away from the past month’s events and pretend they never happened. The Obamacare defunders chastened. The establishment just grateful to have the latest embarrassment behind them.

Janet Yellen has been named Chair of the Federal Reserve. But as for the Great Stupid Impasse in Washington, I can’t say that anything significant has happened over the past 24 hours or so.

I’m glad somebody finally said this — the 14th Amendment applies to Congress. Many have said that the 14th gives the President a means to raise the debt ceiling without Congress, and maybe it does. But more significantly, the public debt clause in the 14th binds Congress to not allow the nation to default. You’d think the baggers who get misty-eyed in reverence for the great founding document, would notice this. More proof they can’t read?

See also the Booman

Harry Reid plans to put a long-term debt increase with no strings attached up for a vote in the Senate this week. He needs just six Republicans to join the Dems for a two-thirds vote, and Reid seems to think he can get that. If not, he will challenge Senate Republicans to kill it with a filibuster, making them own the default. If the bill does pass, it will pressure the House, somehow. Although I’m not sure how. The House appears to be too oblivious to be pressured.

Brian Beutler adds another twist:

Reid will likely use a mechanism to allow the president to increase the debt limit on his own, subject to a veto-able resolution of disapproval by the Congress. In other words, the only way the debt limit won’t increase is if two-thirds of both the House and Senate feel it must be pulled back into the realm of legislative horsetrading — something that will never happen absent bipartisan agreement.

I’ve been bouncing around checking out several news stories about this, and most are hazy on details. I’m not sure if the people writing the news stories quite understand what’s going on, either.

A mess o’ Republicans and their supporters have persuaded themselves that the dire predictions of disaster if the debt ceiling isn’t raised are just scare stories coming from the White House. Power Tool John Hinderaker explains that the United States cannot default on debt, because the 14th Amendment says it can’t, therefore God will send us the magic beans we need to find all kinds of surplus money sluicing around Washington.

All we have to do is prioritize, see. Just cut other stuff, like Medicare and the Marines, and we’ll be fine. Just don’t close war memorials.

In short, House Republicans will not see sense, and most Senate Republicans won’t, either, although maybe enough will to get a two-thirds vote.

One of the most surreal reverberations of the government closure is that the Right is in a snit over the closure of war memorials. They’re dumbfounded that government stuff is actually closed.

John Cole wrote yesterday,

Reading report after report that wingnut congressmen and their stooge followers are all pissed off that parks are closed and that the government shutdown has actually shut down the government. What exactly did they think would happen?

The guiding principle of the GOP for decades has been to make government so small you could drown it in the bathtub. We’re not to the drowning part yet, but right now the Republicans are getting the next best thing, which is giving the American people a royal swirly with a shutdown. You’d think this would make them happy- it’s what they wanted, it’s what they fought for, it’s what bill after bill coming out of the house the past few weeks was designed to do, and yet, for some reason, they are pissed they got their way.

The government is shut down, people are suffering. That’s what you all wanted, right?

According to NBC News, yesterday a group of Vietnam vets found the way to the Vietnam Memorial on the Washington DC mall was blocked.

News4’s Mark Segraves said two U.S. Park Service Rangers manning the gate asked that the group respect the government’s shutdown but moved aside.

Segraves described the exchange as pleasant and respectful.

The veterans then moved the barricade and walked down to the wall to pay their respects. But a flood of tourists followed even though the memorial is closed to the general public.

“The consensus among the group of Vietnam veterans was we’re going to go anyway. We’ll go through the barricade,” North Carolina resident Reid Mendenhall said.

U.S. Park Police arrive to the scene, asked everyone to leave and put the barricade back into place.

In the fevered minds of one rightie blogger, the vets stormed the “barrycades,” and then the Park Police came to oppress everyone into order. The Weekly Standard headline is “NBC: Police Remove Vietnam War Veterans at Memorial Wall.”

The Right thinks that President Obama is closing war memorials just to be mean. It’s not like the government is closed or anything. Oh, wait …

What did they think would happen? Most of the park security and custodial staff were sent home. Do the baggers want days and days of trash to accumulate while John Boehner is out looking for his manhood? That could take some time. And if I were a terrorist, I might think this would be a swell time to set a bomb at the Lincoln Memorial, while the few Park Rangers on duty are busy trying to keep the tourists from trashing the monuments. (Note to NSA: I wouldn’t really do this. Honest.)

It’s like they can’t make a connection between action and consequences.

Yes, it’s a damn shame that people planned trips to see Washington, DC, and found so much stuff closed. I’m glad my offspring and I got our trip to Philadelphia in before this happened. But, y’know, that’s what happens when you shut down the government. Real people suffer real disappointments.

What did they think would happen?

Speaking of disappointments, someone I know managed to get admitted to a cancer treatment trial just before the closure. This trial is pretty much his last hope. He was really lucky, because he wasn’t supposed to start until after October 1, but someone else dropped out, so he got in. But I can’t help but think of the people who were counting on that trial to give them, or their loved ones, a chance to survive. And that’s been snatched away from them. And the wingnuts are whining about closed war memorials.

What the bleep did they think would happen?

From what I can tell the House baggers still think they can get cookies and candy if they keep holding their breath. Yesterday afternoon Robert Costas wrote at NRO:

It hasn’t been announced, and you won’t hear about it today, but the final volley of the fiscal impasse, at least for House Republicans, is already being brokered. And according to my top sources — both members and senior aides — it won’t end with a clean CR, or with a sprawling, 2011-style budget agreement. It’ll end with an offer — a relatively modest mid-October offer that concurrently connects a debt-limit extension, government funding, and a small, but strategically designed menu of conservative demands. …

… What I’m hearing: There will be a “mechanism” for revenue-neutral tax reform, ushered by Ryan and Michigan’s Dave Camp, that will encourage deeper congressional talks in the coming year. There will be entitlement-reform proposals, most likely chained CPI and means testing Medicare; there will also be some health-care provisions, such as a repeal of the medical-device tax, which has bipartisan support in both chambers.

To which Ed Kilgore responded,

You get the feeling Costa’s informants are really proud of themselves for being so very modest in their demands, albeit with some worry that it won’t be enough for the Tea Folk, some of whom would just as soon see a debt default anyway.

Nowhere in the piece, of course, is there any recognition that the president and Harry Reid might mean what they say in stating over and over again that they will not negotiate over a debt limit increase.

Meanwhile Ted Cruz, playing the role of Mad Hatter, said,

“The House began — it is the view of every Republican in this body, and indeed every Republican in the House, that Obamacare should be entirely and completely repealed. Nonetheless, the House started with a compromise of saying not repealing Obamacare but simply that it should be defunded.”

John Boehner is telling the baggers to hang tough, and that they are locked in an epic battle. Boehner is either the Dodo (who suggested a Caucus Race in which everyone just runs in a circle until they stop, without declaring a winner) or the Mock Turtle, who cries a lot.

Ezra Klein writes,

Here is a partial list of bipartisan budget negotiations we’ve had since 2010: The Simpson-Bowles Commission (which, people forget, was the legacy of a 2010 debt-ceiling increase). The Domenici-Rivlin commission. The Cantor-Biden talks. The Obama-Boehner debt-ceiling negotiations. The Gang of Six talks. The “Supercommittee.” The Obama-Boehner fiscal-cliff talks.

All these negotiations have one thing in common: They ultimately failed.

This is the baffling context for Speaker John Boehner’s interest in a conference committee (which, by the way, Republicans have been refusing on the budget for six months) or some kind of tax-reform commission. We have run this play before. We have run it again and again. We have run it using top congressional leaders and President Obama. We have run it using B-string congressional leaders and Vice President Biden. We have run it using retired politicians and wonks. We have run it using various non-leadership members of Congress. We have run it with fast-track authority, and with the threat of sequestration and with the danger of the debt-ceiling. It hasn’t worked.

In fact, it’s worked so poorly that, of late, Republicans have simply refused to be part of these negotiations. After the fiscal cliff, Boehner told his members he was done with backroom negotiations with the president. And Republicans have spent the past six months refusing to enter budget negotiations with Senate Democrats.

Dave Wiegel writes that Dems have been uncommonly tough.

The intransigence of Democrats, from Obama on down to red-state senators, has surprised the GOP. They honestly expected a few of the Democrats to crack—after all, four of them are running for re-election in states that voted for Mitt Romney. …

…Landrieu and Pryor never buckled. They voted with the rest of the party to amend or table every House bill. So did Alaska Sen. Mark Begich and North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan. …

…Why do they stick with Majority Leader Harry Reid—why, when three of them could cast “safe” no votes and Reid could still beat the House bills? Democratic aides say that the red-staters are “scared straight” by the House GOP. They’re not getting the calls from home to defund Obamacare. Their home-state papers aren’t dogging them, either. They’re in no fear of losing an “optics” battle to John Boehner and company.

Neither are the House Democrats. Neither are progressive organizations—not even labor unions like the Teamsters and AFL-CIO, which loudly demanded changes in the law, got cited by Republicans as proof that the Democratic coalition was imploding, then started showing up on the Hill for solidarity marches with furloughed workers. … There’s a new, near-total refusal to compromise….

…“Dealing with terrorists has taught us some things,” said Washington Rep. Jim McDermott after voting no on one of Thursday’s GOP bills. “You can’t deal with ’em. This mess was created by the Republicans for one purpose, and they lost. People in my district are calling in for Obamacare—affordable health care—in large numbers. These guys have lost, and they can’t figure out how to admit it.” Why would House Democrats give away what the Supreme Court and the 2012 electorate didn’t? “You can’t say, OK, you get half of Obamacare—this isn’t a Solomonic decision,” McDermott said. “So we sit here until they figure out they fuckin’ lost.”

The GOP is frantically messaging that it’s really the Dems, not them, who are the “party of no.” Yeah, like that’ll work.

On the optimistic side of things, Brian Beutler thinks that Republican leaders might be realizing they are trapped. However, they’re still hoping to draw the President into some kind of negotiation, which means they aren’t really facing reality yet.

I think Paul Krugman’s assessment is about right —

Just last week we had Paul Ryan blithely assuring National Review that “nobody believes” that Obama will refuse to make concessions over the debt ceiling, and citing examples from the past that anyone who has actually been following the issue knows have no relevance to what’s happening now.

In other words, GOP leaders fundamentally misjudged the situation (and Obama’s incentives). And now they have backed themselves into a position where they don’t know how to back down — they have to extract concessions or they’ll have been “disrespected,” in a situation where Obama simply can’t make any concessions without destroying his own credibility and betraying the fundamental norms of governance.

Krugman says that as the debt limit date draws near, markets and going to freak out. And it is widely assumed this will cause House Republicans to blink.

But given their behavior so far, why would you believe this? I can easily see Ted Cruz making a speech declaring that the freakout is all Obama’s fault, and that what the markets really fear is socialism or something — and the base believing it.

My bet now is that we actually do go over the line for a day or two. And what ends the immediate crisis is not Republican action but a decision by Obama to declare himself not bound by the debt ceiling. He can’t even hint at this possibility until the thing actually happens, because he has to keep the focus on the Republicans, and he has to make them demonstrate their utter irresponsibility before he can take any extraordinary action.

I think the only way we can avoid passing the default date is if the House Republicans capitulate, and I don’t see them doing that.

Ezra Klein:

To the White House, the shutdown/debt ceiling fight is quite simple, and quite radical: Republicans are trying to create a new, deeply undemocratic pathway through which a minority party that lost the last election can enact an agenda that would never pass the normal legislative process. It’s nothing less than an effort to use the threat of a financial crisis to nullify the results of the last election. And the White House isn’t going to let it happen.

The Republican running against Mayor Cory Booker for the late, and great, Frank Lautenberg’s Senate seat is named Steve Lonegan. I didn’t know much about Lonegan, until now. Now I know Lonegan is an idiot.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry called the nation’s implementation of Obamacare “a criminal act” as he ended his trip across New Jersey today with a rally for U.S. Senate candidate Steve Lonegan outside a Bergen County diner.

Rick Perry? He invited Rick Perry to New Jersey to campaign with him?

In Bergen County, no less. Bergen is right across the Hudson from Manhattan. I lived there for ten years, before I moved to New York. It’s no hotbed of liberalism, but unless the population recently began to feel the effects of mercury poisoning, or something, it’s not that right wing, either, especially on social issues.

And if there’s one thing I know about New Jerseyites, it’s that the howdy partner cowboy act does not resonate with them. It’s utterly alien, like performing Chinese opera at a Polish wedding.