Obamacare and the shutdown: rightful stand or neoconfederate obstruction?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/19/obamacare-shutdown-headtohead

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Matt Rinaldi: 'Cruz's courageous stand exposed Quisling Republicans'

Senator Ted Cruz is the biggest threat to business as usual in Washington in the last 25 years – and that is a great thing for America.

His grassroots campaign for Senate in 2012 promised action, not mere talk, in addressing Obamacare and our nation's $17tn and ever-growing debt. Much to the chagrin of Beltway insiders, he has unapologetically delivered.

Cruz's position was eminently reasonable. He encouraged the GOP to fund every portion of the government with the exception of the very unpopular Affordable Care Act – Obamacare's official name. This would allow Democrats and Republicans to then negotiate changes to a law opposed by more than 50% of Americans. In response, Democrats chose to force a partial government shutdown and blame the GOP until it agreed to fund the law with no changes.

The fight against Obamacare is not a Tea Party issue or even a Republican issue; it is an American issue. Obamacare is a disaster even from the perspective of Democrats. Obama pledged the law would lower premiums by up to $2,500 per year for a typical family by January 2013 and improve the economy. In practice, the law has encouraged employers to shed full-time jobs on a massive scale, induced doctors to leave their fields and raised premiums by as much as 300%.

This is before it is even fully implemented. The fight over the funding of Obamacare was a fight that needed to be fought.

The potential negative effects of a shutdown were real but overblown, especially when weighed against the potential disaster posed by Obamacare's implementation. Despite the president's deliberate attempt to talk down the markets and the media's dramatic warnings of economic Armageddon posed by a mere 17% of the government remaining temporarily idle, the S&P 500 closed at a record high the day after the shutdown ended. Neither the shutdown nor the debt limit deadline, as Moody's confirms, ever posed any real threat of default.

Cruz's bold stand against Obamacare was attacked by GOP senators primarily on the basis that the outcome was inevitable. Yet, their very opposition to Cruz made it inevitable. If Republicans had held firm and directed their fire against Democrats and Obamacare, Democrats would be forced to defend their decision to shut down the government in order to protect a massively unpopular and unworkable piece of legislation. Instead, from day one, Senate Republicans conceded defeat, turned their fire on Ted Cruz; and House Republicans and echoed Democrat talking points. With this initial bargaining position, what reason did Democrats have to negotiate?

Democrats entered this fight to save Obamacare; Cruz and conservatives entered this fight to save Americans from Obamacare. Though conservatives lost in the end, the battle accomplished something important. Cruz's courageous stand against Washington exposed Quisling Republicans to an electorate tired of empty words.

• Matt Rinaldi is an attorney, candidate for the Texas State House of Representatives and was an early Tea Party organiser

Diane Roberts: 'What the Tea Party really wants is to repeal the modern world'

Since General Robert E Lee surrendered at Appomattox, disaffected white folks from below Mason and Dixon's defining line have liked to declare, "the south will rise again." Unfortunately for all of us, they've been proven right. For the past two weeks, the south, in the guise of a neoconfederate rump in Congress, held the United States hostage.

Two-thirds of the 30 to 40 members of the House who shut down the government and gleefully pushed the country toward defaulting on our debt come from former slave states. Opponents of the Affordable Care Act from Florida to Tennessee deploy regulatory roadblocks, such as refusing healthcare "navigators" access to county health departments, inspired by the "massive resistance" southern governors and legislatures used to repulse desegregation. Echoing the tactics of Jim Crow politicians in the 1950s and 60s, Ralph Hudgens, Georgia's Insurance Commissioner, promised that when it came to "Obamacare", he'd do "everything in our power to be an obstructionist".

Whether in office or stomping around in a powdered wig and tricorn hat, Tea Party zealots claim they're fighting to save the soul of America, a mission so crucial they wouldn't have minded crashing the global economy to do it.

To them, government is evil. President Barack Obama is a "Marxist-Leninist" hell-bent on destroying freedom – a dictator who lights his cigarettes with smouldering copies of the constitution as he invites brown-skinned aliens to overrun the country, and imposes socialism upon us all.

We have seen this before. With the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, southern states felt – as South Carolina's articles of secession put it – they'd "no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the federal government will have become their enemy". The south's ruling elites called for a second American Revolution to restore their version of constitutional government. That "revolution" is better known as the American civil war – the bloody internecine conflict in which 750,000 Americans died.

Though the Confederacy lost in 1865, its heirs still holler for war against their own government. Last Sunday, in Washington, DC, about 200 people took part in what was billed as the "Million Vet March". Some used the old white supremacist scare tactic of waving Confederate battle flags in front of the home of a black family – in this case, the White House.

Others, such as Rep Michele Bachmann and Senator Ted Cruz, revelled in the government shutdown, then pitched a fit when they discovered that the parks and memorials in DC's care weren't open (logic isn't a Tea Party virtue). Meanwhile, Freedom Watch's Larry Klayman called for "a second American nonviolent revolution", compounding the silliness with a call "that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Qur'an down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up." Some areas of the country – roughly coinciding with Tea Party strongholds in the south and the west – struggle with the idea that black people are "real" Americans, so accepting Barack Obama as the legitimately-elected president of the United States sticks in their collective craw.

Obama won this round, but come 15 January, when Congress must reauthorize another continuing resolution, the neoconfederates will have regrouped and may try once again to "save" the country by destroying it. They say they want to repeal Obamacare, but what they really want to repeal is the modern world.

• Diane Roberts is a writer, broadcaster and regular Guardian contributor. A native of Florida, her most recent book is a history of Florida, Dream State

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