Today Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2), chair of the GOP “freshman class,” will accompany House Speaker Boehner’s leadership team to meet with the President to talk about the shutdown impasse. Dscussing the upcoming meeting on last night’s Larry Kudlow show, she was all sugary platutudes about how she expects that the meeting will result in “solving big problems.” Interestng how a tantrum over Obamacare has morphed in Wagner’s rhetoric into a high-minded crusade to fix everything from “balancing a budget, deficit reduction, welfare reform.”  

Interesting but also frightening since her riff on the “big problems” she and her Republican colleagues are inviting Harry Reid and President Obama to assist with solving also gives us a clue about the pound of flesh the GOP may try to exact in lieu of killing Obamacare outright. The words “entitlement reform,” aka undermining Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and, yes, Obamacare, were tossed around in this context.

The other special Wagner theme was the way that the righteous Republican House members have worked to fix all the problems caused by that nasty shutdown that the Democrats caused by not ceding the government to the Republicans who lost the last election:

We want to make sure vital services are funded, that the government is open, and we don’t want to deal with this nonnegotiating mentality that’s out there. nor should we be scaring the american people with threats of recession and ransom and retreat. These things are wrong.

Vital services funded? Cherry-picking popular programs to fund amounts to cheap PR-stunts.

Democrats and the President demonstrate a non-negotiating mentality? Rich coming from a member of the Party of No, folks whose refusal to negotiate has been the major theme of the past three years. Now that they have escalated their terrorist tactics they expect negotiations?

And what’s that about scaring Americans with “threats of recession and ransom and retreat”? Does Wagner really think Americans are such idiots that we don’t know that what she and her GOP colleagues are doing is demanding a ransom for performing their basic duties? Doesn’t she realize that many of us, at least those of us who aren’t Tea Party congressmen, know that shutting the government down hurts the economy, and that flirting with not paying the country’s bills by refusing to raise the debt limit is a recipe for economic disaster.

Believe me, as a citizen who expects to be able to cash in on my hard-earned 401(K), a retirement resource that could be wiped out if the government defaults, I’m very frightened by the rash actions of folks like Wagner – who has been cheering this idiocy on from the beginning.  Remember when this enthusiastic negotiator proclaimed that the “the American people are ready for a fight” to defund Obamacare. Well, she got her fight, but now wants to pretend that all she and her pals ever wanted was a little parlay.

UPDATE:  Steve Benen noticed all the “negotiation” talk as well and points out the fatuousness:

Boehner will instead dispatch 18 House Republicans — whom the Speaker has designated “negotiators,” despite the fact that the meeting is not a negotiation — chosen to represent the caucus. […]  why would Obama spend time with a feckless House Speaker and his hand-picked allies? One of the key lessons of 2013 is that Boehner is Speaker In Name Only and has very little control and/or influence over what actually happens in the chamber he ostensibly runs.

Take that Ann Wagner.

The GOP House Speaker, John Boehner says the shutdown crisis “isn’t some damn game,” but there’s no doubt that the Republicans in Congress are indeed playing a game, and a very dangerous game it is. And what’s worse, Republican leaders are aware that what they are doing is suicidal as far as their party is concerned and homicidal as far as the nation goes. It’s happening because of a few yeast-brained fools who think that they’re making a grand stand for principles that even they are hard put to describe in meaningful terms. E. J. Dionne puts it perfectly; it’s “the Seinfeld Shutdown: It’s about absolutely nothing, at least where substance is concerned.”

How, you may be forgiven for asking, can responsible legislators lead the country into disaster to satisfy continually shifting and politically undigestable demands? The answer: consider the people doing the demanding. And you don’t have to go far to do it since we have here in Missouri more than a few legislators that suffer from the same delusions as the would-be leaders of the attempted GOP coup d’état in Washington D.C.

Let’s start with state Senator Ed Emery (R-31), who exemplifies the constitutional fetish common to so many GOP legislators who were agitating for the shutdown. To give you an idea about how bad it is, Emery holds that the vetoed gun bill, HB436, widely deemed by legal experts to have egregiously violated the Constitution, was “the most constitutional bill this year, not just in Missouri’s Legislature, but in any state.” Not surprisingly, he also insists that despite the contrary opinion of the Supreme Court, Obamacare is not only unconstitutional, but constitutes an overweening threat to God and Country:

One need know little about the origins and history of America and the origins and history of Obamacare to know that this fight is not about the survival of Obamacare or of a political party, it is about the survival of the Republic. …

I’m willing to bet that this poor schmuck, like plenty of the D.C. Tea Party contingent, really believes this sort of tripe. It’s based on an attitude that views the Constitution as a magical, quasi-religious icon that codifies the deepest wishes of ignorantly genuflecting true believers, rather than a mental construct that has to be intellectually apprehended. How else could Senator Emery ignore the constitutional authority of the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare? Garrett Epps  points out some of the most common rightwing Constitutional errors and identifies some purely non-existent passages and words that are commonly bandied about by these folks, all of  which allow them, in Epps words, to wave the Constitution “about like great-grandpa’s Confederate cavalry sword to demonstrate that we can’t have health care, or environmental protection, or whatever other policy they oppose today.”  

Not surprisingly, you get a heaping serving of the stupid when you leaven this faux-constitutional fervor with the simplistic economic cliches current on the right – beautifully exemplified by state Rep. Mike Kelley (R-126), who baldly states that “the federal government is shutdown today and the last few days because it’s out of money!” That, of course, is untrue in general terms, and untrue when it comes to the claim that we cannot afford Obamacare; in fact, repealing Obamacare would actually increase the deficit.

So what we’re confronted with are a gang of none-too-bright legislators with a poor grasp of economics, tons of inbred prejudices, and heroic yearnings focused on a poorly digested understanding of the Constitution. In short, ripe for plucking.

And plucked they have been, as the the New York Times made clear in a recent article on the evolution of the shutdown which traces its roots to months of planning on the part of rightwing groups such as Americans for Prosperity, Heritage Action for America and others, all generously funded by titans of industry like the Koch brothers, and happily steering the equally dim-witted federal analogues of Emery and Kelley into our current disaster. The goal? To destroy any legislation that would slow progress towards a United States of America that more closely resembles those third-world, free-market paradises where many of these “job-creators” have already gone to do their low-cost creating.  

Reps. Ann Wagner (R-2) and Jason Smith (R-8) want furloughed federal workers to know that they too share the pain of the government shutdown. The two Republican Missouri lawmakers, along with Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, have joined the other congessmen and women – 138 as of last Friday – who decided that something had to be done about the bad smell that was rising from the Republican shutdown and contaminating all of Washington D.C. These legislators have all publicly stated that for the duration of the shutdown they will either defer their congressional salaries or donate them to charity.

It ought to mean a lot to those federal employees, many of whom live pay-check to pay-check and who now have to scrape by on nothing, that congressmen whose median net worth hovers at around a $1 million want to make a symbolic gesture in their direction. Wagner, for example, is actually one of the wealthiest members of the House.

The gesture on the part of the 73 Republicans participating in this exercise in optics might mean more if they were also willing to end the standoff that they started with their outrageous ultimatums. As it is, it stands as a classic example of too little, too late and no way to make amends.

If, to return to the example of Ann Wagner, she really cared about the mess she has helped her party create, she could lean on the House leadership to bring a clean budgetary continuing resolution (CR) to the floor – which could pass with the support of Democrats and those Republicans who have already signalled their disgust with their party’s antics. Or she could stand up and let her colleagues and the GOP leadership know that she would support a discharge petition and vote for the CR if Nancy Pelosi tries to use that tactic to bring it to the floor.

Instead, as today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch notes, Wagner is “out front pressing Democrats to negotiate on the Affordable Care Act before she will agree to end the shutdown.”  And even worse, as a Post-Dispatch editorial observed last week, shutdown cheerleader Wagner may be motivated as much by perceived political exigency as from conviction. Astutely assigning blame for the current shutdown, the PD observed that:

Narrowly the blame here lies with the approximately three dozen Republicans from solidly safe districts who have confused right-wing messaging with leadership. They are joined by several dozen more GOP members, including Ann Wagner of Ballwin, who are more worried about primary challenges from the right than fulfilling their constitutional duties. They are putting personal political interests ahead of the public interest.

Refusing to take an unneeded salary in order to defer criticism? A so-so gesture at best. Actually trying to do the best thing for one’s constituents and one’s country? Priceless – and, in today’s GOP, very, very rare.

GOP Senator Roy Blunt seems a bit perplexed by this whole showdown over Obamacare that has to date shut down much of our government’s key functions and may yet involve the debt limit, thereby risking global economic security. He’s got a problem because he needs the GOP’s wild and stupid wing if he is going to remain a senator; there’s no way a coalition of GOP moderates and centrist Democrats would get him re-eleted – like a nineteenth century  ingénue, coyly lifting her skirts to reveal a bit of ankle, he’s let a little too much corruption show. While that may titillate the big money boys, it does nothing for voters who pride themselves on their sober good sense. Which leaves Blunt, who is actually a smart man, doing a balancing act with the stupid as he attempts to navigate the potential pitfalls of indulging the latest GOP dumb-as-mud rampage.

As the clip below (h/t The Turner Report) shows, Blunt is trying to solve his problem by looking sage while offering a logically incoherent and historically inaccurate apologia for the GOP shutdown tactic:

Blunt’s rationale for the shutdown seems to hinge on three related assertions:

1. Republicans are just acting out because they didn’t get much say abut how the law was passed.

2. They are hurt that they didn’t get to amend or modify the law after it was enacted (he dubs it “unamendable”).

3. The President gets to unilaterally modify the law; Blunt’s evidence is that the administration has delayed the employer mandate. Ergo the GOP wants to delay the individual mandate in the name of fairness or something incoherent to do with which group would pay the most in penalties.

To answer Blunt’s first objection, you have only to remember when congress was involved in the endless process of healthcare “sausage making.” It was endless because of all the efforts to bring along Republicans; hopeless efforts because, far from being excluded from the legislative process, the hormonally challenged mental adolescents of the GOP were refusing to play; they were already involved in a separate game of kill-the-bill.

You don’t believe me? Remember the Gang of Six? After numerous delays to give the group, specifically the GOP members, time to come to agreement, the Chair of the group, Max Baucus, had to give up because the GOP members were “being told by the Republican Party not to participate.”

Blunt’s second claim ignores the fact that the GOP has consistently refused to work with Democrats to make the law better, opting instead for non-stop, futile efforts repeal the law or defund it. As a Los Angeles Times editorial  observed today, there are “several things that members of Congress could be doing now to make it [i.e. Obamacare] work better, if Republicans were interested,” adding that:

In fact, when Republicans complain that Democrats won’t negotiate about Obamacare, what they’re really saying is that Democrats won’t agree to kill it, delay the insurance reforms and subsidies until after yet another election, or undermine the law in a way that could send premiums for individual coverage through the roof.

The GOP’s clear objective is to dismantle the act, not to improve it – and the single-minded focus on that goal is what has led to the partial government shutdown that began Tuesday. Democrats can hardly be blamed for refusing to bargain over how to sabotage the law before it fully takes effect.

The quote above also puts a spike in the heart of Blunt’s whine about the fact that the GOP “offer”  to release their hostage in return for delaying the individual mandate was summarily rejected. It’s not, as Blunt seems to think, a question of fairness or a matter of revenue. It’s a question of the law’s success.

The employer mandate can be delayed, giving the government time to address problems, since it affects relatively few businesses and the delay will have little impact on the law’s implementation – a one year delay won’t, as Blunt claims, lead to many large business abandoning their employee health plans.However, delaying the individual mandate would “undermine the law in a way that could send premiums for individual coverage through the roof.” Obamacare cuts costs and can offer lower premiums because the individual mandate guarantees the big risk pool that is the holy grail of private insurance.

What Blunt’s actually arguing is that after the GOP refused to play the game, their Monday morning quarterbacking should entitle them to a do over – and if they don’t get it, they’re justified in shooting the umpire. Or, to quote Post Partisan‘s James Downie, ‘Republicans are acting like the little kid in a toy store who won’t take “no” for an answer.” Sadly for the GOP, that’s not the way things work – at least as long as the adults – the Democrats in this case – continue to act responsibly. And finally, no, Roy Blunt, these are not smart arguments for a smart man to make – no matter how he tries to obscure the embarrassing meaning of the things he’s saying with mumbly gobbledygook.  

I’ve been energized and frequently convinced by the what The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky writes about the GOP shutdown. Today, for instance, he argues that Boehner will eventually have to “buckle down” and let a clean CR pass the house, ending the shutdown. To back up this opinion, he points out a growing number of Republicans who are making conciliatory noises, as well as the general unease that many GOPers are evincing in the face of what they have wrought.

However, for that to happen – and Tomasky hints at as much – the GOP is going to have to be forced to acknowledge that they are not speaking for all or even most Americans, as they fatuously insist. Polls will help to bring them to their senses on this issue – and on Day One of the Shutdown of 2013, they’ve been disastrous for the GOP. The Quinnipiac Poll released today shows that 72% of Americans disapprove of the shutdown; respondents also apparently place the blame correctly, since GOP approval rates are plummeting while Democratic approval rates are rising somewhat (see also the CNN/ORC poll (pdf) released yesterday to glean some more bad news numbers for the GOP).

Another part of the effort to insure that the Democrats stand firm in the face of GOP efforts to smear them with the blame for the GOP’s misfire is for Americans who care about what is happening to flood their Democratic legislators with calls of support and Republican congress people with phone calls and emails making it clear that we hate what they are doing and we aren’t taken in when Republican troublemakers claim that the Democratic sheriffs are the source of the problem. Tomasky offers the best metaphor I’ve encountered yet for the Republican effort to deflect blame for their gratuitously stupid decision to escalate their Obamacare tantrum into all out war on the American people:

What the citizen won’t know-unless someone bothers to point it out to her, Democrats!-is that the Republicans are totally out of bounds in the first place; that this is like having a property-line dispute with your neighbor, and the local court has already ruled in your favor, and then your neighbor comes back a year later and says he’ll settle for half the disputed property and if you don’t agree, he’ll kill your dog. Actually, that’s a pretty good analogy. I hope someone in a position of power reads this.

I agree, as I’ve said, it’s a good analogy. I think it’s so good, in fact, that I’m going to call my Representative, Ann Wagner (R-4) and read it onto her phone answering service machine – which is all that I can get right now.  

I just saw KSDK’s (Channel 5 in St. Louis) coverage of the coming government shutdown. They showed clips of both Ann Wagner and Claire McCaskill telling us what they thought of the way it had all gone down. If the McCaskill clip was really indicative of what she has to say on the topic, or, horror of horrors, indicative of the general Democratic response, then we’re done for. If it wasn’t, then Channel 5 is attempting to confuse us by presenting a false image of an equivocating Democrat parcelling out equal blame for what are exclusively GOP actions – which is exactly the way that the anchor described McCaskill’s statement. We heard the following rambling sentence in the clip:

I find the situation we are in now beyond frustrating and I can imagine what the American people must be thinking right now, and it is very hard from a distance right now to figure out who has lost their minds, one party, the other party, all of us, the president …

My hope – actually, my belief – is that the very short clip, clearly truncated, cut out the heart of what McCaskill was really saying.

Certainly KSDK’ presentation of McCaskill’s message  differed from the way she has been handling the issue up to this time. For example, earlier today, on the topic of a bill passed to guarantee military salaries in the event of a shutdown, McCaskill noted that such tiny measures wouldn’t lessen the pain that a shutdown will cause – and she was as clear as she has been on other occasions in the past couple of weeks about who the guilty party is:

I don’t think it makes it easier for the Republicans to shut down the government over us not agreeing to repeal Obamacare after we had an election last November that decided it …

The clip that Channel 5 showed of Ann Wagner couldn’t have offered a greater contrast. An energized, argumentative Wagner pushed the absurdly contorted GOP line that the House – the  folks who are causing all the trouble – was working to keep government open while hardline Senate Democrats just wouldn’t compromise. She positively oozed indignation as she talked over Wolf Blitzer during the CNN interview* from which the clip was taken.

Wagner’s flagrant dishonesty aside, and no matter who did what in regard to McCaskill  – wehther she cut the feet out from under her Democratic colleagues, or, as I am inclined to believe,  KSDK either purposefully or incompetently  offered selective reporting that distorted her response – lots of regular Americans, the sort of people who believe what they see on the TV news, took away the message that there’s blame to go around, and Democrats in congress deserve a share – maybe more than a share since, clearly, Ann Wagner was righteously incisive while Claire McCaskill was shamefaced and vague when seen on KSDK.  This, my friends, is how the terrorists win.

UPDATE:  Ed Kilgore’s survey of this morning’s headlines (day 1 of the shutdown) find them taking the “false equivalence,” bad GOP, equally bad Democrats route. He makes my point about how harmful misleading media coverage is far more eloquently than I:

Maybe such headlines reflect laziness and ignorance rather than silent partisanship, but they are more effective instruments for the GOP position than the fieriest Ted Cruz speech.

_______

*You can see the entire interview that the Wagner clip was taken from on her Webpage.  Be prepared, however, to gag when she brings up the canard about how Senators are shutting down the government because they won’t undo the fix that permits congressmen and congressional staff –  who now must purchase their insurance from the Obamacare exchanges – to receive the same type of employer subsidies that the rest of us who have employer supplied insurance receive. Of course, Wagner, who is a millionaire many times over, doesn’t need the subsidy – and clearly doesn’t care if her staff don’t get the same treatment as other Americans who have insurance through their jobs as long as she can misrepresent the situation for political advantage.  

Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2) after voting to persist in the GOP government shutdown experiment yesterday:

Our message has been pretty consistent: We want to keep this government open. We want to find a solution for the people we represent and for America. It’s hard to do that when the Senate won’t come to work.

In the same vein Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-3) is upset that the Democrats won’t give in and let the GOP do an end-run around all that democratic, majority rules sort of nonsense when it comes to Obamacare, or, as he puts it, “put aside partisan politics and do the right thing for hard-working families and pass this legislation [i.e., the House’s delay-Obamacare-for-as-long-as-possible budgetary CR] as soon as possible.”

Michael Tomasky paraphrases Richard Pryor on why these representative members of the GOP House can now legitimately be considered to be part of a  terrorist organization:

Back in the late 1970s, Richard Pryor had a routine where he gave a rundown on the various factions he’d encountered inside prison. There were the black Muslims, he said. They were fairly rough customers. Then there were the Double Muslims. The Double Muslims, he said, “can’t wait to get to Allah, and they wanna take a bunch of muthafukkas with them.”

Can  you uess who the Double Muslims are in today’s GOP party? Another part of Tomasky’s GOP-as-terrorists argument aptly cuts through the GOP’s – in this case Luetkemeyer’s and Wagner’s – laughable efforts to escape responsibility for their irresponsible willingness to pull the pin on the grenade as long as they take lots of other, mostly innocent folks with them:

… The complete psychological profile of this GOP also must reference the totalitarian mind. Here I refer to the common totalitarian tactic of accusing the enemy of doing exactly what the totalitarian himself is doing. Every totalitarian dictator from Stalin on down has employed this tactic regularly. There’s no surer way to get away with criminality than to accuse your political opponents of exactly the criminality that you are committing, to get the people looking the other way.

And so of course John Boehner said over the weekend that the Senate, if it fails to accept the House’s terms, “will be deliberately bringing the nation to the brink of a government shutdown for the sake of raising taxes on seniors’ pacemakers and children’s hearing aids.” And of course whip Kevin McCarthy said, “We will not shut the government down.” And of course Sen. Rand Paul said: “We are the party that’s willing to compromise. They are the party that says, no way, we’re not touching Obamacare.”

You don’t even need to have read Orwell to know these are quasi-totalitarian statements that depend on obfuscation, rely on the gullibility of the listening public. The obfuscators all know very well that most Americans won’t stop to realize that their position is a scandal to begin with. They’re trying to undo a law that was duly passed and then upheld by the Supreme Court, as if that were normal in American politics, as if it should be considered an acceptable tactic on its face. And they know that … some Americans (I don’t think most, in this case) will stupidly and dismissively assign equal blame to both sides.

Oh well, at least we can console ourselves with the knowledge that the ever-refined Ann Wagner is “gratified” that the GOP leadership capitulated without a fight to the constantly expanding crazy wing of the party. I’m sure some of the lower-rung federal workers who’ll be hitting the food pantries because they won’t be getting a paycheck will be equally gratified that their suffering, along with that of others who will be sacrificed to this particular piece of GOP hubris, is bringing such peace of mind to GOP Rep. Wagner.

From Rep. Billy Long’s (R-7) statement justifying a vote for a budgetary continuing resolution that seeks to delay Obamacare for a year, a vote that guarantees a government shutdown:

“Our military men and women put their lives on the line to protect our country and freedoms.  We owe it to them and their families to ensure they continue to receive their paychecks in the event of a government shutdown.”

Somebody needs to break it to Billy that he’s had two opportunities within the last week to ensure that our military men and women get what’s due to them, and he bungled both for no reason other than to make a stink about a duly enacted law that he and a few of his friends don’t like.

Maybe Billy doesn’t understand that votes have consequences and that this particular vote might very well create difficulties for lots of Americans, including the military members that he’s so worried about. This supposition may be correct since he doesn’t seem to understand that elections, such as the two that brought Barack Obama to the White House and then retained him in the presidency, should have meaningful consequences.

Or alternatively, maybe Billy just doesn’t like democracy. That’s right, democracy. The will of the people. Which is what 65 million Americans spelled out clearly last fall when they voted for the man who gave us Obamacare. Further, many of us who exercised our democratic perogative last November are also part of the ca. 69% of Americans who think Billy and his GOP pals should give the anti-Obamacare tantrums a rest. How democratic is it to thwart the will of the people?

Today GOP Senator Roy Blunt voted to shutdown the government. He’s made noises in the past that indicated he knew just how wrong and stupid such an event would be. But he did it anyway. Last Wednesday I wrote about Blunt’s effort to confuse us with his fancy dancing around the issues:

No matter what, though, don’t let him sell you any of his equivocating mumbo-jumbo; when push comes to shove he will have told us by means of his vote on the Continuing Resolution whether or not he’s decided that, discretion being the better part of valor, it behoves him to kiss the ring on Rush Limbaugh’s hand and cede the Republican Party to big, bad Ted Cruz.

So now we know what it means to be Republican in this day and age and suffice it to say it isn’t pretty. Duane Graham of The Erstwhile Conservative understands just why Blunt migrated from the dark side to the pitch-black GOP netherworld:

… even though Democrats prevailed on the vote, I’m sure that all the soldier-loving, Social Security-sucking seniors in Missouri who put Blunt in office are as happy as can be that he voted with 43 other Republicans, many with grossly undeserved reputations for “reasonableness,” to show the world that the United States government is just one Republican-friendly election away from Tea Party disaster.

Disgust at Blunt’s craven behavior aside, this whole situation has lots of potential to burn Republicans badly – no matter how they attempt to squirm and wiggle their way out of the trap they have built for themselves. As Michael Tomasky aptly puts it:

You can only set so many houses on fire before people finally figure out that this isn’t happening by accident and you must be an arsonist. The GOP is now flirting with that moment. It can’t come soon enough.

Blunt seems to have some primitive awareness that something really, really bad could be waiting at the end of the current GOP trail, which could be why, although he has conceded the budget fights to the Cruzians in his party, he has refused to endorse the ugly suggestion of Missouri’s fully insured (at taxpayer expense) Lieutenant Governor, Peter Kinder, that uninsured Missourians boycott the Obamacare exchanges. Blunt, unlike Kinder, is not a total idiot and I am guessing that he’s figured out that if too many innocent bystanders get burned in the GOP Götterdämmerung, even agile corporatist equivocators like himself might go up in smoke come election time.

Reporting the latest on the efforts of congressional Republicans to delay Obamacare and enact Mitt Romney’s economic agenda or else they shutdown the whole shebang, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch quotes Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2):

“The American people don’t want a shutdown. But you know what? The American people are ready for a fight,”said Wagner, noting polls showing diminishing support for the Affordable Care Act.

“The president is willing to negotiate with everybody form [sic] the Russians to the Syrians to the Iranians. But he won’t sit down with ‘we the people’,” Wagner asserted in an interview.

What is it with these people? Does Wagner think she has some kind of spiritual power that allows her to channel the wishes of the the “American people”; what makes her so sure that we’re ready for a “fight” about Obamacare or anything else on the GOP wish list. If so, her channel is out of kilter since I’m an American and she definitely doesn’t speak for me or for most of the people I know. Which leads me to believe that her too grandiose speech habits reflect simple hubris – or that she’s trying to kick sand in our eyes so we can’t see that nobody is backing her up.

Wagner tries to justify her presumption by citing polls that show a majority disapproves of the ACA. Of course, even though media types rarely bring the fact up, based on other, earlier polls with different questions, almost everyone knows that at least a fourth to a third of the people who disapprove of the ACA do so because it lacks a single-payer or public option. They’re the “socialists” who didn’t get their way, Tea Party claims to the contrary, though, unlike the Tea Partiers, few of them would derail the healthcare reform we did get out of spite – hence the other polls that show that only a small minority support the GOP hostage tactics. In fact, a recent Pew poll found only 23% of Americans in fact want Wagner’s fight:

Take a look at that chart and tell me how Wagner can feel free to make such extravagant claims about what Americans want?

And what the holy crap does Wagner mean when she says that the President won’t sit down with “we the people” to negotiate? It’s true that he says he won’t negotiate with the Tea Party terrorists in congress – and the rest of the Tea Party whipped GOP – who want to hold the economy hostage to an agenda that lost at the polls in 2012. However, last I heard, these losers don’t have exclusive rights to that phrase. So, no matter how infuriating Wagner’s inaccurate appropriation of the constitutional phrase is, if “we the people” is a shout-out to the Tea Party, we better hope she’s right.