Republicans used to take credit for being fiscally responsible. In recent years, however, they’ve started to spend lots of taxpayer money on ideological gestures without getting much  of anything in return. The sad thing is that GOPers, along with everybody else, probably know that they’re wasting money, but they can’t resist the pander credits that they hope to gain.

The latest boondoggle could be  state Senator Kurt Schaefer’s (R-19) efforts to remove Planned Parenthood allocations from Medicaid federal funds. The pander credits he is trying to amass, as everyone agrees, are to be applied to his campaign for the office of attorney general:

… Schaefer leads a charge to punish Planned Parenthood for alleged traffic in human parts gleaned from aborted fetuses.  […] The issue of how Planned Parenthood handles fetal remains stems from a thoroughly discredited video shot under cover and heavily edited to show an agency official discussing a possible legal sale of fetal material to a person claiming to be a possible buyer. A later investigation by the Missouri attorney general’s office found no wrongdoing. Two activists involved in making the video are under indictment by a grand jury in Texas.

Schaefer is head of the Missouri Senate committee investigating Planned Parenthood, a role he apparently covets as part of his campaign [for the office of attorney general].

Apropos a subpoena issued to the CEO of the Missouri Planned Parenthood:

Best quote of the day comes from economist Jared Bernstein’s blog:

House Republicans released their budget today, and I found it to be…um…how can I put this nicely?…orthogonal to reality

“Orthogonal to reality.” And here I thought we’d exhausted all the ways that there were to describe GOP delusions. Bernstein amplifies his remarks:

The policies put forth in this document suggest that America’s main problem is that the poor have too much and the wealthy, too little. The budget plan “corrects” this perceived imbalance by deeply cutting programs that help low- and middle-income people, and cutting taxes on those with high incomes, capital gains, multinational corporations and “pass through” business income.

Of course, as he notes, GOPers claim that this recipe results in growth that floats all our boats. Sadly, as Bernstein observes after pointing out the rather obvious problems with this logic:

I too believe in the American people and growth but I don’t believe in magic asterisks or tax cuts that pay for themselves. It’s great to have faith, but math is good too

Read the entire piece – it’s quite brief. And remember that part about the importance of math. I think that the observation is pertinent to the budget Missouri’s Republican-dominated legislature wants to impose on us. Something on the order of what is sinking Kansas, Wisconsin and a whole host of states with like-minded legislatures. That’s where the phrase “orthogonal to reality” becomes relevant to us as well. Just think, Scott Walker is destroying Wisconsin with this same mumbo-jumbo and, as a result, he’s a front-runner for GOP presidential candidate.

All of Missouri’s Republican House delegation joined the 144 Republican House members who voted no on the budgetary continuing resolution sent to them from the Senate, which amounts to five votes from Missouri to keep the shutdown going. To a man or woman, these members of the Missouri Shutdown Hall of Shame tried to justify their votes with references to those all-purpose boogymen, the deficit and “out of control spending” (see also here).

To a man or woman, they have all also refused to admit they initially went to war with the nation’s well-being for no reason other than to defund the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – even though the ACA reduces the deficit long-term. Nor are they willing to admit that the main ACA concession they demanded as a sop when it became clear that the rest of the Congress and most of the country regarded their anti-Obamacare jihad as laughable, a repeal of the medical devices tax, was a special interest boondogle that would have undercut the ability of the ACA keep government costs down. All that reasonable bystanders can conclude from this is that our GOPers are either dishonest, severely deluded, or dumber than fenceposts.

According to S&P estimates, the antics of these shutdown diehards cost the U.S. economy $24 billion and cut 0.6% off of yearly fourth quarter GDP growth. Tell me how this reflects concern with the economy. Think Progress has compiled a partial list of government expenditures that could have been financed by the amount of money lost in the shutdown:

— The net cost of to the government from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP): $24 billion

— The Department of Agriculture’s proposed budget: $22.6 billion

— NASA’s approved budget: $16.6 billion

— All air transportation programs, including the Federal Aviation Administration, security, research, and other costs: $21.9 billion.

— The Child Tax Credit: $22.1 billion.

— The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program (formally known as welfare): $17.7 billion.

— The cost of Head Start, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Women Infants and Children (WIC) program combined: $25.2 billion

I hope you noticed that all or parts of these expenditures were or are bitterly opposed by these same GOPers who insist that we can’t afford them. Nevertheless, they’re all more than willing to run up similar costs in the service of empty symbolic gestures meant to impress their base. But as Think Progress also noted, these pols have been making the same types of choices from the getgo:

The shutdown was just the latest budget crisis that has been costly to the economy. A recent report found that the uncertainty created by fights over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling that have cropped up since 2010 has cost the economy nearly a million jobs.

And, to cap it all off, there are already rumblings from the GOP crazy caucus, with whom Missouri’s GOPers seem to have allied themselves, that they’ll be willing to give the ol’ shutdown routine a go once again early next year when yesterday’s agreement runs out. However, as Michael Tomasky wrote today, one thing may have changed:

. . . At least the American people did get to see what assassins the Republicans are. That was valuable. Many of us have been trying to say for many years now about Washington’s polarization and dysfunction that yes, both sides are to blame, there are no Boy Scouts here, but the sides are not remotely equally to blame, and this is a crucial point, and journalists and commentators who keep insisting on framing things this way out of some devotion to “balance” that is out of whack with the facts of reality are disserving the republic; lying, basically. I don’t think now any commentator can seriously maintain that fiction. . . .

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.

Via Politico we learn that Claire McCaskill seems to be feeling her oats when it comes to the threatened GOP government shutdown over their OCD efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act (ACA):

I don’t think in America we should throw tantrums when we lose elections and threaten to shut down the government and refuse to pay the bills,” the Missouri Democrat said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The American people had a choice last November. They had a choice between someone who said repeal Obamacare, and President Obama.”

[. . .]

“I cannot believe that they are gonna throw a tantrum and throw the American people and our economic recovery under the bus,” she said of Republicans. “It is really gonna hurt real people. And this is just political point-making.”

McCaskill was feeling so empowered that she characterized the GOP shutdown antics as “Akin-itis.” (Well … duh! Did anyone ever really think that Todd Akin was an isolated phenomenon in the party of Galloping Old Poops?)

McCaskill’s GOP opposite number, though, Senator Roy Blunt, has a different take as you might expet. Nevertheless, there are plenty of hints that he’s a bit squeamish when it comes to the floor-kicking, full-out tantrum that folks like Ted Cruz are promising:

Blunt has given no indication of siding with a determined element promising every rules trick to keep the anti-heath law offensive alive. Before that moment comes, all Republicans can weigh in heartily on the new law.

“I’m no supporter of the president’s health care plan. I believe it won’t work, there’s evidence every day of that, and I’ll vote to not move forward with it,” he said in a Friday interview.

He added: “I don’t know where we’ll be in the middle of the week.”

What could account for McCaskill’s political vim and vigor and Blunt’s cautious and worried tone? Could it be, as Robert Kuttner points out, that an unpopular shutdown is a dangerous ploy for vulnerable Republicans:

This very high-profile mess, just a year before next mid-term election, could upend assumptions about 2014. Democrats need to pick up just 17 seats to take back the House. Most analysts put the number of at-risk Republican seats at between 20 and 25, meaning that Democrats would need to run most of the table. But a deeper look suggests that more Republican seats could be vulnerable. In 2012, Republicans won 41 seats with 55 percent of the vote or less. If Democrats hold their own seats and win back even half of those, they take back the Majority.

Of course, for Blunt the issue probably also threatens to have even more tellling blowback: the people who employ him, his corporate cronies, are aghast at the reckless abandon of his more extreme Tea Party congressional colleagues. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has urged the GOPers to act in a more fiscally responsible manner. Even Wall Street recognizes the foolishness for what it is. The big money folks will fund any kind of stupidity as long as it gets pols sympathetic to their money-making needs into power. Where they draw the line, though, is when the stupidity spills over into financial lunacy – a fact that is surely not lost on Blunt. After all, as Slate’s John Dickerson puts it:

House Republicans aren’t just courting disaster. They’re helping President Obama make the case that they were the problem all along.

No wonder McCaskill is energized and Blunt suitably subdued.