GOPers preparing for govt shutdown, Republicans want to cut $12bn in just one week

They are going to nickel and dime the President to political death.

First, from Brian Beutler we learn that House Republicans are privately preparing for a shutdown. And with the Teabagger fringe now running the party, I don't see how there's any budget, short of something totally traitorous, that the President could agree to and appease the people.

At a House GOP caucus meeting Monday evening, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told members to expect to receive guidance on Tuesday outlining protocol in the event of a government shutdown.

If funding for the government is not renewed before Friday, members will be advised to furlough non-essential employees, who will be told not to communicate using office resources in accordance with federal law.

And in fact, we learn from ThinkProgress that Republicans ar publicly preparing the public for a shutdown, and already blaming Democrats for the very shutdown the GOP is planning:

It’s looking more likely that this latest impasse cannot end without a government shutdown. This week, House Majority leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) declared that the American people would hold Democrats accountable for such a result. And this morning on Fox & Friends, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) repeated the talking point:

BACHMANN: We learned from Harry Reid, we learned from Chuck Schumer what the whole game plan is on the Democrats’ side. They are giddy about seeing the government shut down. That’s what they want. We can’t forget that. The Democrats want the government shut down.

In fact, Republican intransigence is the driving force behind the likelihood of a shutdown. Previous resolutions cut $10 billion from the budget, and the Democratic leadership has offered a total of $30 billion in cuts through the end of the year. This is roughly what Republican budget chairman Paul Ryan suggested at the start of the debate, before a Tea Party upheaval forced the House Republicans to pass a bill with both $61 billion in spending reductions and a series of controversial budget riders gutting funding for Planned Parenthood, health care reform, and the EPA.

Republicans now insist this budget must be the bare minimum for negotiations moving forward. They have also pointedly refused to consider savings in other parts of the budget, including defense spending or wasteful corporate tax subsidies.

And finally we learn from AP that the Republicans are preparing a short-term spending bill, only good for one week, that would cut a massive $12bn in just that week. The beauty of this neat little trick is not just to get the President to cave to hostage-takers (as he admittedly does) but they get to revisit this in another week with another temporary spending bill cutting just as much.

Why not increase spending in the one-week bill, as a sort of mini-stimulus? Why are we constantly debating on the Republicans' own terms? Perhaps because the President caved on this issue a year ago and we've never fully recovered since. Those of us who warned that it was a seriously bad move by the President to "admit" to the GOP talking point that the deficit had grown too big and needed to be addressed immediately (thus pulling the legs out on any remaining public support for the stimulus) - we warned that this would come back to bite him in the ass, and we were sadly, again, right. Just as we predicted that the Republicans would get the message when the President said in December, famously, that he'd rather cave than let hostage-takers kill the hostages. So prepare for another hostage crisis. And another, and another, and another...