Jon Perr: Party of Lincoln Wages War for Government Shutdown

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Jon Perr at perrspectives.com has an informative post on the Party of Lincoln Wages War for Government Shutdown (excerpts):

As the nation prepares to mark next week's 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, the Party of Lincoln stands on the brink of shutting down the federal government. But whether it comes this week over the GOP's budgetary blackmail of Planned Parenthood and the EPA or next month over the Republicans' newly discovered antipathy to raising the debt ceiling, Americans will know which party was responsible. After all, now as 150 years ago, "one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive."

In his Second Inaugural on March 4, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln reflected on the beginning of the Civil War then nearing its end. Recalling that "insurgent agents" in Washington sought "to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation," Lincoln recalled for posterity that:

"Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."

Substitute "government shutdown" for "war", reverse the roles of the parties and Lincoln's is an apt description for the looming shutdown of the federal government.

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While the specter of a global financial cataclysm caused by the default of the United States caused most sentient mammals to denounce that prospect as "insanity" (Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee), resulting in "severe harm" (McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi), "financial collapse and calamity throughout the world" (Senator Lindsey Graham), "financial disaster" (House Speaker John Boehner), Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republican colleagues are determined to continue with the game of chicken. Apparently, American fiscal suicide is a small price to pay for political power.

As this budget clash comes down to the wire, the words of Lincoln's Second Inaugural are eerily appropriate. Slavery then and Republican political power now was an interest "localized in the southern part" of the country. Of that "peculiar and powerful interest," Lincoln explained, "All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war." And as he put it 150 years ago in his First Inaugural:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."

Sadly, in public and behind closed doors alike the response of today's Party of Lincoln to his plea to preserve the government is a simple one.

Shut it down.