It's official. The Tea Party hates their own country.

Oh please. Does A2K really need another one of these threads?

Oh please. Does A2K really need another one of these threads?

How are both parties to blame?!?!?

This has nothing to do with balancing the budget. This is about a radical minority of one party in one branch of Congress trying to force the rest of American to gut the health care bill they don't like.

There is a normal legislative process that is designed to have this fight. They are unable to get political support for the normal process, so now they are resorting to this extortion attempt.

There is only one side to blame for this.

Article 111
[Interim budget management]

(1) If, by the end of a fiscal year, the budget for the following year has not been adopted by a law, the Federal Government, until such law comes into force, may make all expenditures that are necessary:

a) to maintain institutions established by a law and to carry out measures authorised by a law;

b) to meet the legal obligations of the Federation;

c) to continue construction projects, procurements, and the provision of other benefits or services, or to continue to make grants for these purposes, to the extent that amounts have already been appropriated in the budget of a previous year.

(2) To the extent that revenues based upon specific laws and derived from taxes, or duties, or other sources, or the working capital reserves, do not cover the expenditures referred to in paragraph (1) of this Article, the Federal Government may borrow the funds necessary to sustain current operations up to a maximum of one quarter of the total amount of the previous budget.

[...]Both sides are to blame. But the root of the problem, beyond argument, is a Republican party that is losing touch with reality. Even its control of the House of Representatives is a distortion. In the Congressional vote in 2012, Democratic candidates polled half a million more votes. But thanks to gerrymandering by Republican-run state legislatures, the GOP ensured itself a majority.

Gerrymandering, in turn, has led to safer seats, in which the danger to an incumbent is – increasingly – less the general election in which he faces a Democrat, than a possible challenge from a more conservative fellow Republican in the primary. That in turn has pushed the Congressional party further to the right, allowing the minority Tea Party faction to make the running. More centrist, pragmatic members fear to make deals with Democrats that will be held against them by the hardline activists who dominate primary voting.[...]