The shutdown of the U.S. Government is a reflection of a government that, at all levels, has lost its moral compass. One can blame the Republicans and the extreme right within the party as the ones who are primarily responsible for this debacle. But they only made it this far because they have been aided in their lunacy, even if indirectly, by the Democrats and the other branches of the government.
By all accounts, including one from a sitting Justice, the Supreme Court is one of the most activist in history, gutting laws on an unprecedented pace and for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the law is right or wrong, but because it can.
Then you have the executive, in Obama and his endless cadre of advisers and deputies. Had they really cared about the American people, those “regular folks who live paycheck to paycheck”, they would have sought to reform the country’s healthcare system from the ground up. Instead, they cared more about their own records and ambitions, and having a law they could call their own. The result: healthcare reform legislation that was written largely behind closed doors by lobbyists offering only incremental benefits to the public.
In making this grand compromise, Obama lost the one bargaining chip that perhaps would have made the difference in the debates leading up to today’s government shutdown: the merits of Obamacare. Is there any question that the public would not have embraced a genuinely reformed healthcare system so that they would have done what they did with Obama’s request to Congress to back his foolish foray into Syria: tell their representatives and their government to stop the foolishness. Instead, Obama is left with a impossibly complex, patchwork of a law that he can neither discard nor defend. How does one expect to energize the general public when all it really has to look forward to is the status quo? But this is old news when it comes to Obama and the Democrats.
The impression one is left with is that the government makes decisions that only benefit those who run it not those whom it was created to protect.
Invisible Man 