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Maynard says:

I just want to get this off my chest. I think Krauthammer is correct when he says that a government shutdown over Obamacare would be destructive to the Republicans.

I think the Boehner speech was what you would expect. He didn’t want to do it and he had to do it and so he had to defend it, and that is kabuki. I think it’s going to go to the Senate and if we end up with a shutdown, it is going to be kamikaze, and the Republicans will end up sushi. Very thin slices. And everybody knows this, this is sort of a charade.

Cruz is going to get a lot of airtime, he’s gotten a huge amount of airtime. There is nowhere to go on this. The irony is, as I have been saying for weeks, Obamacare is so unpopular, even the unions are up and arms against it, the AFL-CIO came within a hair of calling calling for its repeal. Right now, they want all kinds of changes which they are not going to get.

So you have Democrats against it, it’s about to kick in and we heard today that they don’t even have the software that will enable the system to calculate what the subsidies are after hearing that they don’t have the software to ascertain what you say is your income and thus your subsidy is true, so it’s on an honor system. This is going to be a complete disaster, we’re on the threshold of that. As Chuck [Lane] indicates, the Republicans are on the upswing of the issues and now this? It’s insane and it’s not going to happen.

Tammy argued that since Obamacare is unpopular, therefore the Republicans should gain a political advantage by exploiting its unpopularity. Krauthammer also notes the Obamacare unpopularity, but his point — which I think is the dominant factor — is that a government shutdown would distract from the unpopularity of Obamacare, and instead bring focus on the Republicans, who would then be blamed (unfairly but very, very loudly) for everything that subsequently goes wrong. Especially including the train wreck of Obamcare which, it will be said, was on the verge of working until those malicious Republicans wrecked it. (In case you hadn’t noticed, this is the narrative being created…”Yeah, Obamacare is struggling, but that’s due to obstructionist sabotage and not our fault. Just give us more power and we’ll fix it right up.”)

The problem here is that, if the Republicans play chicken with Obama and a shutdown starts, the Republicans will cave when things become painful. You can say they shouldn’t, but you know that’s what’s going to happen, and it’s what happened before.

Look, if you’re going to play chicken with someone, you need to hold out for a scenario where you’ll win if neither side blinks. The Republicans won the sequester battle and left Obama looking like a fool, because they held out and nothing bad happened. But they lost the previous debt ceiling battles because too many bad things will happen (or appear to happen) if Uncle Sam’s credit is squeezed. You can argue till you’re blue in the face that a government shutdown isn’t a problem, and in fact it would probably be a good thing, and you’d be right and I’d agree with you. But that’s like saying that Nazis are bad and you have to fight them. Yes, the Nazis are bad, but you’ve got to pick your battlefield carefully. Krauthammer’s point is that this is a losing battlefield.

Okay, I hope I’m not annoying anybody, because I hate the fascistic paternalism of Obamacare as much as you do, and I personally believe that all parties responsible for it should be ejected from government and put on trial for subverting the Constitution (that is to say, treason). But I know that’s not going to happen, so I’m stuck advocating for the most practical pathway through this corrupt and dysfunctional era.