Monday Morning Political Mix

Good Monday morning, fellow political junkies. The partial shutdown of the government enters its second week and on Day 7 neither side appears to have softened its position.

At least furloughed federal workers got the good news over the weekend that Congress had approved giving them backpay for the time they locked out of their jobs.

Here are some of the more interesting political items that caught my eye this morning.

Speaker John Boehner said on a Sunday appearance that there aren’t enough House votes to pass a temporary spending bill containing no provisions opposed by Democrats that would reopen the government, writes NPR’s Bill Chappell. Meanwhile, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) dared Boehner to prove it by bringing the Senate-passed spending bill to a House floor vote, Huffington Post’s Ashley Alman reports.
A Republican congressman not identified by the Washington Examiner sat down with reporters at the news outlet recently and likened the fiscal fight that led to the government shutdown to Battle of Gettysburg. Byron York writes that the congressman told the journalists that The GOP is in the role of the Confederate forces that stumbled into an engagement with Union forces at a time, place and manner they hadn’t foreseen, he said, with both sides trying to improvise a way out.
Which Speaker Boehner will we see as the shutdown crisis enters its second week? is the apt question asked by National Journal’s Matt Berman. From the outside, Boehner has looked like a pinball, first bouncing this way than than, depending.
Among Republican nightmares has to be this: Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is apparently planning on tormenting them long into the future. The crusty 73-year old Senate majority leader who has taken to calling them “anarchists” is preparing for a 2016 re-election run, reports Politico’s Manu Raju.
Justice Antonin Scalia may be accused of many things but boring probably isn’t among them. The conservative icon displays his feisty, funny and uber-confident intellect in a bouncy interview with Jennifer Senior in New York Magazine. Among the discoveries: he’s no fan of social media, finding “strange” the notion of being “friended” and that he believes the devil is hard at work making people non-believers in God.
The Republican Party is far away from where it needs to be if it intends to be a serious governing party that can attract a majority of voters and it doesn’t have much time to make a course correction, writes Judd Gregg, the former Republican and U.S. senator and New Hampshire governor, in The Hill.