US Shutdown Day 6 Taking the Day Off

The Legislators are taking a day off Sunday, to make time for TV appearances it seems.  The only progress, if it can be called that, is both sides have reiterated their positions.  The House Democrats tried to get a majority of House Members to sign a Discharge Petition to force a vote on a increasing the debt limit until Nov 15, but one of the Republicans they had hoped to help, Rep Peter King of NY, refused to sign it.  This seems to insure that we are at a stalemate until Oct 16, ten days away.

To recap house action the last week,

House Rejected the Senate response to H.J. Res. 59, a "Clean Funding CR".
H.J. Res. 70 Fund the National Parks and Smithsonian. 
H.J. Res. 71 Fund the City of Washington DC 
H.J. Res. 72  Fund Veterans Benefits 
H.J. Res. 73  Fund National Institutes of Health
H.J. Res. 75  Fund Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children
H.J. Res. 85  FEMA Funding
For the most part, all failed in the Senate, but a bill to pay federal workers for time lost due to the shutdown did pass both houses.  Here is some commentary on the standoff from the New York Magazine.

The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends. The only thing that limits the debt ceiling’s potency at the moment is the widespread suspicion that Boehner is too old school, too lacking in the Leninist will to power that fires his newer co-partisans, to actually carry out his threat. (He has suggested as much to some colleagues in private.) Boehner himself is thus the one weak link in the House Republicans’ ability to carry out a kind of rolling coup against the Obama administration. Unfortunately, Boehner’s control of his chamber is tenuous enough that, like the ailing monarch of a crumbling regime, it’s impossible to strike an agreement with him in full security it will be carried out.