Is anyone else bummed out by the shutdown? I'm not referring to the 800,000 government employees watching "The Price is Right" from their couches, or even to the 30 kids shut out of NIH clinical trials so that Republicans can prove that Harry Reid's not the boss of them. It's the anti-climax that's getting me down.
Where's the madness we were promised? A federal work stoppage beginning on Obamacare Implementation Day and less than two weeks before we hit the debt ceiling! I was expecting fiscal Ragnarök—rivers would change course, stone statues would weep, and Treasury coffers would at last spill forth with trillion-dollar coins. Instead we get ... outraged Times editorials and fruitless negotiations. And now House Speaker John Boehner has apparently foreclosed the possibility of national default. This is what we've been waiting 17 years for?
The people need a fix of political demagoguery, and The New Republic is here to deliver it. This cavalcade of budgetary crises didn't arise from nowhere; Republicans assured us that the enactment of the Affordable Care Act would pretty much bring about the end times. If their promises are destined to go unfulfilled, we can at least revisit the thrills, chills, and unending Nazi comparisons that got us here.
"Look, we saw in Britain, Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, 'Accept the Nazis. 'Yes, they'll dominate the continent of Europe, but that's not our problem. Let's appease them. Why? Because it can't be done. We can't possibly stand against them.' And in America there were voices that listened to that. I expect those same pundits who say it can't be done, had it been in the 1940s, we would have been listening to them."
"And what is Obamacare? It is a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that allowed slave owners to come to New Hampshire and seize African Americans and use the federal courts to take them back to federal… to slave states.”
“That’s why we’re here: Because we’re saying let’s repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens. Let’s not do that. Let’s love people. Let’s care about people. Let’s repeal it now while we can.”
“Obamacare is the most dangerous piece of legislation ever passed in Congress.”
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
“We the people have been told there is no choice. You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo—the IRS…Now that Congress can use the taxation power of the federal government to compel behavior or lack thereof, what’s next? More taxes if we don’t drive Toyota Priuses or if we eat too much junk food or maybe even pea soup?”
Idaho State Sen. Sheryll Nuxoll
“The insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange.”
“If Obamacare is ever implemented and enforced, we will never recover from it. It is an unconstitutional takings (sic) of God-given American liberty.”
“[I]t’s a racist tax and I thought I might need to get to a sun tanning booth so I can come out and say I’ve been disenfranchised because I got taxed because of the color of my skin.”
“This is the end of prosperity in America forever, if this passes. This is the end of America as you know it.”
“I have a message for you: You’re going to die sooner…When you restrict the ability of the primary care givers in this country to do what is best for their senior patients, what you are doing is limiting their life expectancy.”
“I am a little bit of a student of history and I’ve seen what that, I believe, final death knell will be to America of having government control that very critical aspect of our life, which is access to the care that we need to stay alive.”