In Case You Were Wondering: It's Not About the Budget

Those were the days! Picture from Think Progress

As in 1995, the big government shutdown is not really about the budget. It's about riders. Culture war ultra-conservative issues shoe-horned into the budget bill. It's a cornucopia of conservative crap is what it is. It amounts to blackmail: give us everything our tea baggers tell us they want, or we will shut down the government. NPR? Planned Parenthood? That stuff isn't really about the budget, and everybody knows it.

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FLASHBACK: GOP Insistence On Unrelated Policy Riders Shut The Government Down In 1995



This morning, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) took to the Senate floor and announced that, while Republicans and Democrats had essentially agreed what spending cuts should be included in a bill to keep the government operating, a shutdown was likely because of the GOP’s insistence on unrelated policy riders. . .
 
Read more at: Think Progress