On the road. Shutdown Third Day

View 792 Thursday, October 03, 2013

I am off to the San Diego ComicFest, which is being done by many of those who started ComicCon and became weary of its great size. I’ll be back on sometime soon.

1600: here, safe and sound. Normally if I am in a convention with Larry we travel together, but it didn’t happen this time. Larry is coming tomorrow. We hadn’t coordinated as well as we might.

The news everywhere is over the DC incident. When I heard the cautious reporting: “police officer injured” but never a word about him being shot, nebulous references to “another person in the car” and all the rest it was clear from the beginning that this panicked woman had no gun, and was shot down when she exited the car. By whom I don’t know yet: I would hope that the Secret Service which started this chase (although precisely why isn’t clear: she had some kind of collision with one of the new barriers that keeps closed off a street that has been open to the public for 200 years, and then drove off at high speed with a child in the car – but she was pursued by the Secret Service, than Metro police. It is not clear whether the elite Capitol Police were involved. I met some of them when Newt was Speaker and they seemed to understand who they worked for; they didn’t have that us vs. the damned public attitude that is getting all too common with armed Federal employees.

But that’s just grousing, and it may well come out she was entirely mad. Actually it will certainly be asserted, whether she was or not. And given the state of our Fourth Estate we may never know. I wish more of the current press had performed in The Front Page when in drama class…

Origination Clause  

Jerry,

I’d been mildly against the current House Republican confrontation over delaying Obamacare, on the grounds that it’s a worthwhile goal but I wasn’t at all sure it was tactically wise.

Harry Reid just converted me to a full-fledged supporter of doing whatever it takes – enduring this "shutdown", delaying a debt-limit increase, walking barefoot over hot coals – to enforce the House’s will over what does and does not get funded.

How did Reid do this? There’s a minor fuss today over his saying "why would we want to" in answer to a loaded question about funding NIH and helping kids with cancer. In context, what he said wasn’t nearly as crass as it’s being portrayed.

But in the same video, he said something far far worse. Harry Reid, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0lFyFJeZSY, starting about 45 seconds in: "What right do they [the House] have to pick and choose what part of government is going to be funded? … They have no right to pick and chose."

Uh, Harry, ever read a little thing called Article 1, Section 7 of the US Constitution? And the discussion of that in the Federalist Papers, and 224 years of subsequent practice? The House has every right to decide what does and does not get funded in the Federal government.

Reid has gotten away with bypassing this since 2010 by refusing to have the Senate pass normal Appropriations bills which would be subject to detailed haggling with the House, forcing reliance on catchall Continuing Resolutions instead. Now the House is calling him on that, insisting again on their right to choose what does and does not get funded in the US government, CR or not.

If the Dems in fact see this head-butting contest as an opportunity to permanently remove that right from the House – and that’s what Harry Reid is saying here – then I say to the House Republican caucus, you go!

Do what it takes to win. The actual issue at stake is far larger than a few details of implementing Obamacare.

Porkypine

Certainly the principle that all money bills must originate in the House – which comes from British experience when the House of Lord was important and generally allied with the Crown, and control of the purse strings was vital – is important and worth fighting for.  And now I think the die is cast.