Winning or losing

Here's one thing that keeps bugging me about the shutdown punditry.  Every few days someone trots out a poll that says "The GOP is losing" And that may be technically true in that they are not doing well in national polls which ask "the public" who they blame for the current crisis. (I hesitate to use the word crisis when the whole thing is as contrived as it has been, but I already spent the scare quotes in that sentence on "the public" so... please just note the reservation.)

But picking winners and losers in terms of what policy course actual voters might prefer misses the whole point of the thing.  The entire purpose of this play by the House rump is to subvert the democratic process entirely.  Which is what this does.

Republicans on Tuesday put forth their latest effort to pressure Democrats to come to the table, calling for a bipartisan, bicameral committee to convene to address the impasse over the shutdown and the debt ceiling.

For now, the Democrats are rejecting the super-committee idea on the entirely reasonable grounds that they've already spent the past two years bending the rules in response to these fits. Whether they'll continue in this defiant stance remains to be seen.  Suffice to say, if they agree to another "bipartisan committee" they will have lost on the major point that whether you "win" or "lose" during the legislative process should have some relation to whether you've won or lost in the last round of the electoral process.

But maybe that's an outmoded idea anyway.