Hal Rogers Wants Budget Talks the GOP Opposes

Hal Rogers has been representing Kentucky's Fifth District in Congress since Methuselah was a pup. So unlike the teabagger screeching infants ordering John Boehner around these days, Rogers appreciates an orderly lawmaking process.

Sahil Kapur at TPM:

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) told a handful of reporters Tuesday he supports House-Senate conference negotiations over a comprehensive budget resolution, which Republican leaders have blocked since April.

"They should have done that long ago," he said in response to a question from TPM, before walking into a closed-door GOP meeting to discuss the government shutdown strategy.

Rogers, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Coal, also knows what deep game is being played here while the shit-flinging monkeys of the RandPaul/TedCruz caucus entertain the rubes.

Charlie Pierce:

Corporate money is the power behind all of it, and that corporate money has but one goal -- the creation of a largely subjugated population and a workforce grateful for whatever scraps fall from the table. To accomplish this, the corporate money not only had to disable the institutions of self-government that are the people's only real protection, it had to do so in such a way that the people expect less and less of the government and, therefore, less and less of each other, acting in the interest of the political commonwealth. (The dismantling of organized labor is a sideshow to the main event in that the goal there was to cripple organized labor's political power within the political institutions so that there would be no countervailing force that could be brought to bear against the destruction of its power in the workplace.) For all the endless bloviation about the dead-hand of government, what the vandals in Washington are shooting for right now is a subject population whose tattered freedoms depend on the whimsical ethics of the American corporate class. This is the really deep game being played here, and they're more than halfway to winning it.