No Government Shutdown, But Not Nearly Out of the Woods

We now know what matters most to the people we send to Washington, D.C., to represent us in the halls of Congress.

Party politics.

Not the people of the United States.

Party politics.

Not the safety and security of our troops in the field, and their families back home.

Party politics.

We barely dodged a shutdown of the Federal government, , so that Democrat and Republican party leaders could take their turns before the assembled television cameras, claiming victory for their sides—their ideologies—their party’s positions on the issues.

Did anyone really care about $360 million in funding for Planned Parenthood? Was it really worth coming an hour and 15 minutes from that government shutdown?

No, it wasn’t, except to the far-right wing of the Republican party, who wanted to use the budget battle to instill their version of social correctness.

So, what’s next?

Much, much worse, is what’s next.

What we actually have, as I write this on a Saturday morning, is a continuing resolution to fund the government until next Thursday, by which time the compromise funding the government for the rest of the fiscal year will be written up and passed by both houses of Congress—assuming that everyone involved keeps their word.

As events of the past weeks have shown, that’s not always a valid assumption.

But let’s say that does in fact get done.

We then will be witness to a much bloodier battle over a budget for 2012.

If you think this fight was a mess, it was nothing compared to what’s going to happen with the 2012 budget.

The entire budget will be held hostage to partisan politics: the presidents’ health care law, military spending, the federal budget in all of its parts—no one will escape it this time.

The budget process will be used as a front for a fight over every social program in that budget, for every “entitlement” program: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education funding. Name it, and it will be a bone of contention.

And, with very rare exceptions, the decisions that will be made with regard to all this will not be made for the overall good of the American people, they will not be made for the peace and security of the United States.

They will be made to try to make Barack Obama, John Boehner, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell heroes in their supporters’ eyes.

They will be made for what has become the transcendent reason in Washington, D.C.:

Party politics.