Lauren Fox at National Journal has been doing a lot of good reporting about the upcoming Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown. But I have to admit to being flummoxed by the whole thing. The Republicans seemed determined to create fights with no other point than to make President Obama look bad. And then more often than not, they fail even at that. I now have a bit more sympathy for Charles Krauthammer; it must be really painful to watch your own party do this. And for what? Over the issue of “amnesty” for five million people that can be reversed the moment a Republican gets in the White House?

But Fox provided one clue to the situation in an article on Monday, Conservative Groups Won’t Budge in Their Opposition to a Clean DHS Funding Bill. It would seem that what conservatives want the Republicans in Congress to do is what they want America to do: look strong, beat their chests, pretend that they are more powerful than they really are. It’s pathetic, but that is about right. She quoted Dan Holler of Heritage Action saying, “If Senator McConnell reverses course and pulls this bill, without forcing the Democrats to get on it, that is going to embolden Senate Democrats to hold out constantly on every single bill.”

Really?! That’s what is going to make the Democrats do that? It isn’t, oh, I don’t know, six years of Senator McConnell doing exactly the same thing to the Democratic majority? That’s hard to imagine. But that actually circles back to Krauthammer. As I discussed before, he is delusional if he thinks that a government shutdown is going to be blamed on the Democrats. Everyone knows who wants a government shutdown. This is not an issue that can be finessed.

Fox continued, “Not blinking first, [Dan Holler] contends, is the only way Republicans can display dominance to Democrats in the new Senate.” What are they? A pack of dogs? Do conservatives really think that the Republican Party can bully its way to power? It all goes back to this general belief of the conservative movement in the United States that they can will themselves to power. The idea is that if they just hold out long enough — if they are willing to destroy the entire nation, then they can get their way. It is like a game of chicken.

But as Jonathan Bernstein wrote yesterday, Will McConnell or Boehner Blink First? He noted, “John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are playing a game of chicken this week. Against each other. Whoever veers off first will lose more True Conservative points.” It all comes down to the fact that the Democrats don’t need to do anything. So the question is whether Boehner or McConnell will give in first.

But in addition to it all being pathetic, it is dangerous. We’ve long known that Boehner doesn’t have control of the crazies in his caucus, and now we know that McConnell doesn’t have control of the crazies in his — led by Ted Cruz who is a true believer in the will to power theory. And if they are acting this way about immigration, what’s going to happen when it comes to the debt ceiling. I find it all exhausting. These freaks can do untold damage — not just to the United States, but to the entire world. And it won’t hurt them. There will always be millions telling Ted Cruz that he’s a great man.

Kevin Drum asks a fair question, Is It Fair to Keep Peppering Scott Walker With Gotcha Questions? Basically, is it right to ask him if he believes in evolution? The whole thing brings me back to a quote I heard from an ex-conservative who said that the hardest thing about being a conservatives was always having to lie about what you really thought. And that, I’m afraid, is why questions about evolution are hard for Republicans.

Let’s look at the position that Walker is in regarding evolution. I suspect that he actually does believe in evolution. He’s a reasonably bright guy who is surrounded by educated and sophisticated people. He may have compartmentalized the issue, but I doubt seriously that he thinks evolution is a big conspiracy by atheist scientists. The problem is that the base, which is going to vote for whomever the Republicans nominate, are the ones who want him to be a creationist. But in a general election, the non-base who might vote for a Republican don’t want to vote for one of those crazy Republicans.

So I think it is certainly okay to ask him “gotcha” questions. It isn’t because any reporter cares whether he truly believes in evolution or the president’s love for the country, but rather because it tests him as a politician. Look at Todd Akin. He didn’t lose because of his loony ideas about rape and abortion; he lost because he was loony enough to talk about it in public. That’s a key distinction. And in Scott Walker’s case, we know that he’s as loony in his beliefs as Todd Akin. The question is how he’s going to finesse his looniness publicly.

I wish we didn’t have these “gotcha” questions. I wish instead that reporters were interested in actual policy. Walker has been allowed for years to go around and not answer the question of whether he would sign a “right to work” law. Instead, he was allowed to claim that he didn’t think that any such law would come across his desk. Fundamentally, that’s the same thing. But if his really vile conservative ideology had been forced into the light of day, a lot of people would have voted against him for the same reason they voted against Todd Akin.

Now the core of Kevin Drum’s article is actually about why it is that “gotcha” questions always seem to get given to Republicans and not Democrats. The only “gotcha” question I can remember recently was Alison Lundergan Grimes’ refusal to say if she voted for Obama. Of course, that wasn’t a “gotcha” question originally; it was just made into one by her. But it was meant in the same way as the questions that Walker was asked. Who cares who Grimes voted for? Who cares if Walker thinks Obama loves the country?

But this all gets to the heart of a major difference between Republicans and Democrats. Other than a strong tendency among Democrats to have no spine about the simplest of issues (whether they vote for members of their own parties), Democrats don’t have to hide what they really believe. And that is because the vast majority of the things that Democrats really believe are hugely popular. What does Scott Walker believe regarding the economy that is popular? I know of nothing. To Walker, asking about the minimum wage is a “gotcha” question that sends him spinning. “Minimum wage?” The real reason people make so little is Obamacare!

I can see some difficult questions that the Democratic candidates for president might be asked. In particular, they are going to have to deal with Obama’s executive action on immigration. But even there, I suspect that smart politicians will say, “Hell yes, I’m continuing it!” Because the people who really care about killing it will certainly vote for the Republican no matter what. So I don’t see a big problem for the Democrats.

Ultimately, the “gotcha” question is an invention of the Republican Party. It is part of their decades long campaign to “work the refs.” It is meant to intimidate reporters into not asking questions that the Republicans don’t want to answer. For Sarah Palin, a “gotcha” question what what magazines she reads. That’s right up there with, “What’s your favorite breed of dog?” So I hope the gotcha questions keep coming. Because the American people need to know as much as they can about Scott Walker. He’s a bad guy and if the electorate knows what he really stands for, it will rightly run away from him.

On Monday, Nicholas Bagley over at The Incidental Economist wrote, Fifty Shades of Wrong. He’s a little different from most of the people over there in that he isn’t a doctor; he’s a lawyer who specializes in issues related to health. So it’s a good idea to keep up with him, especially these days of the never ending flood of anti-Obamacare lawsuits. Of course, you always have to be careful in listening to what legal scholars say about the law in regard to Obamacare because they can only speak to the law and its traditions. They can’t speak as well to the ideological madness that lives inside the conservatives on the Supreme Court.

This article is in reference to a recent academic article in the University of Miami Business Law Review, Anomalies in the Affordable Care Act that Arise from Reading the Phrase “Exchange Established by the State” Out of Context (pdf). It was written by Timothy Stoltzfus Jost of Washington and Lee University and James Engstrand, a practicing attorney. And it takes on the case in King v Burwell in a very interesting way.

The base of the case is that there is one sentence in the healthcare law that seems to imply that subsidies are only available to state run exchanges — not federally run exchanges. To many people, this seems to be a smoking gun — even to many liberals. But it has been noted that there are other parts of the law that imply just as strongly that the subsidies are to be provided to purchasers regardless of what kind of exchange they use. To me, that’s a very compelling counterargument. The truth of the matter is that in any sufficiently complicated document, there will be inconsistencies and contradictions. (See, for example, Sancho’s disappearing donkey in Don Quixote.) The fact that the plaintiffs have found one — and only one — example of a contradiction does not mean that the proper reading of the law is that one sentence.

Unfortunately, I find myself unable to read the article itself. This is strange, because I’m pretty good at reading scientific papers in fields far outside my own. But the lawyers have their own thing going on. I get the gist of it. But it is too fine-grained for me. So I’ll have to depend upon Bagley’s summary. Basically, what the authors are arguing is that if the Supreme Court finds for the plaintiffs, it will be introducing “at least fifty” anomalies into the law. (Hence the title of Bagley’s article.) In other words, in the name of fixing on inconsistency, the court will be creating far more new ones.

I agree with Bagley’s conclusion:

That last sentence is the killer though. I really want to believe that after all the information that has come out since the Supreme Court took the case, that King v Burwell will go down in flames, nine to zero. It’s my hope that at this point, the conservatives are thinking that they kind of embarrassed themselves in even taking the case. But at the appellate court level, conservative judges have seemed quite willing to find on behalf of the plaintiffs for no other reason than that they just don’t like Obamacare. If there is anything that the last 15 years should have taught us, it is that the judicial system in this country is every bit as political as the United States Congress.

But this information does give me confidence. And I am hopeful that Obamacare will squeak out a 5-4 decision. And if it does, it will be fascinating to see how the conservative justices tie themselves in legal knots — go against almost everything they’ve ever said in the past — to justify why it doesn’t matter what the total law says — only what one sentence says that happens to lead to the conclusion they want.