Lauren Fox reports on the thinking of Republicans:
Many rank-and-file Republicans see an upcoming funding bill that must pass by Dec.11 as the party’s best shot to stop Obama from implementing his immigration plan. Boehner has signaled that “no option” is off the table, and more than 60 House Republicans have already sent a letter advocating the approach. In the Senate, top Republican Mitch McConnell has attempted to squash any shutdown banter, but some in his right flank still might push for a funding showdown.
Members of the Republican Conference say they don’t want the confrontation over government funding to come down to a government shutdown, but many don’t see how, even if that does happen, they could lose politically.
Erick Erickson is itching for a shutdown:
Sure, the GOP may get blamed. But so what? And that is key here — so what. They got blamed last time and the public rewarded them with the biggest election wave in modern American political history from the local level to the federal level.
Bill Scher suspects Obama is trolling the GOP:
Despite the strong sense coming from the House Republican leadership that it has far more control over its caucus now than it did during the Tea-Party-fueled insurgency of 2010, no issue has more potential than immigration to ignite the hard-right base and embarrass Speaker John Boehner—especially after the speaker’s post-election warning to Obama not to “play with matches”—or to cause headaches for the GOP heading into the 2016 elections.
The White House knows this. Thus, we could be witnessing the deployment of a strategy in which the president does indeed play with matches, quite deliberately, and he’s about to throw one right into the tinderbox of the House GOP caucus.
The prospective shutdown is such an insanely bad idea that it is worth diagnosing what mental breakdown led the party to a place where this course of action has received serious consideration. One possible answer is that it stems from a congenital aggressiveness. Tom Edsall, a Washington reporter and longtime denizen of bipartisan poker games, once observed that the two parties display notably different approaches toward risk. “Conservative poker players are more willing to go for the kill,” while liberals “will simply check and turn over their cards to collect a more modest amount.”
There are times when the all-or-nothing play makes perfect sense. This is not one of them. A government shutdown does not give Republicans leverage — it gives Obama leverage. They have no winning move here. The only play is to cut their losses and muddle through while sustaining as little damage as possible.
Previous coverage of the possible shutdown here.
The Dish 