Put on the big-boy pants, Harry

Headlines blare that Harry Reid expects a shutdown, while John Boehner
works to push through his fourth bill to fund the federal government
through the House of Representatives.

What is Reid’s hangup?

The House of Representatives wants to end the funding of ObamaCare, and Harry Reid doesn’t.

Ultimately, Harry Reid is making a decision to shut down the federal
government in order to continue funding a law that has been found to be
unconstitutional in the federal courts, rather than ceasing its funding
until after the Supreme Court decides the case.

What is horrifying is that Reid is willing to use the threat of not funding military salaries to continue funding a law that most observers don’t believe will survive Supreme Court scrutiny.

Why the extreme hard-line stance by Reid?

Because he knows that the longer ObamaCare is in existence, and the more it becomes intertwined into the overall healthcare system, the more difficult it is to rip out by its roots.

The Democrats lost the House of Representatives because of their slavish devotion to passing a version of nationalized healthcare, and Reid and the president are not willing to stop the regulatory train of implementation, even if it means threatening the paychecks of our military and throwing 800,000 federal workers onto the streets.

Reid and Obama would have more credibility in this fight if they hadn’t abdicated their responsibility to fund the government back before the election of 2010, when they determined that passing a budget with a projected trillion-dollar-plus deficit was not politically viable.

Unlike the House, Reid has not led long debates in what was once the world’s greatest deliberative body on the overall direction of our nation’s finances, instead preferring to emerge from behind closed doors and make media pronouncements designed to instill fear rather than shed light.

Now he is shamefully trying to scare military families by threatening their paychecks rather than actually do his job and pass a budget bill. John Boehner has done his job; he has passed, and will pass another, CR through the House. The only question is, When will Harry Reid grow up and become part of the solution by passing a Senate version of a budget? Until he does this, no one should take his comments as anything more than temper tantrums from a child who refuses to eat his broccoli.

It’s time to put the big boy pants on, Harry, and do your damn job.

Rick Manning is the communications director of Americans for Limited Government.