I understand that the Senate convened at 2:00 pm today, and at 2:01 sent a CR stripped of conditions about Obamacare back to the House. The House is expected to vote tonight on a new CR that delays the individual mandate for a year (yeah, right) and would require members of Congress and their staffs to buy insurance on the exchanges without any subsidies. Why that last one makes sense to anyone is unclear.

It’s what we might call an “impasse.” The House keeps attaching a one-year delay in the Affordable Care Act, plus a lot of other random stuff, to the continuing resolution to keep the government funded a couple more months. The Senate keeps saying no deal; they aren’t agreeing to the delay. The President says he will veto a cr that contains a delay. I don’t think anyone is going to blink.

I get the impression that the House baggers sincerely believe the Senate will cave and are genuinely baffled why they haven’t already.

John Dickerson writes at Slate,

With less than two days until the government runs out of money, the clock is ticking and no one is negotiating. House Republicans voted Saturday on a new set of amendments it would like to tie to continued funding of the government, and Senate Democrats promptly said, “Nuts to you!” They’re going to vote to table the amendments on Monday, which will kick the issue back to the House.

Depending on when the bill returns, Republicans may try one more gambit to chip away at Obamacare, but time is growing short—the deadline is Monday at midnight. That means the decision whether to keep the government open will fall squarely on House Speaker John Boehner. He has two options: He can allow a vote on the Senate bill that passed (with Democratic votes) on Friday to fund the government until Nov. 15 or permit the shutdown to go forward, as a way to pressure the White House and satisfy his most conservative members.

C’mon, Boehner, for once in your sorry-ass life, be a mensch. Fall on your bleeping sword and put the Senate bill up for a vote.

Boehner and other House Republicans are pissed that the Senate didn’t meet today.

Speaker of the House John Boehner accused Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats of “breathtaking arrogance” for intentionally not convening a Sunday session to deal with compromise legislation to stop a government shutdown.

“The House worked late into the night Saturday to prevent a government shutdown, and the Senate now must move quickly, today, to do the same,” Boehner said Sunday.

Which of course is crap, because the Senate has made its final offer. The House can either take it or leave it. It’s that simple. Whether the Senate met today or not doesn’t change anything.

There’s a must-read in-depth report at the New York Times about the accidental shooting of children. The article presents evidence that these shootings have, for years, been grossly under-reported in official statistics, perhaps by as much as half. Because of quirks and inconsistencies in the way the deaths are recorded and reported, many are neither counted as accidents or prosecuted as homicides. It’s like they don’t happen.

Further, very few states have effective “negligence” laws in the books that make it a crime to leave a loaded gun where a child can get to it.

Researchers recognized this under-reporting probably was happening back in the 1990s, but the NRA successfully lobbied to stop the research.

See GOP’s Dangerous Debt Limit Demand: A Christmas Tree Of Conservative Goodies. Then read Matt Yglesias, House GOP Just Showed Why Obama Can’t Compromise on the Debt Ceiling.

The one thing Obama absolutely cannot do under any circumstances is negotiate over the statutory debt limit.

The reason is that Republicans are essentially asking for an end to constitutional government in the United States and its replacement by a wholly novel system.

From Jonathan Strong’s report at NRO, what Republicans want in exchange for agreeing to not default on the national debt is a one year delay of Obamacare, Paul Ryan’s tax reform, the Keystone XL pipeline, partial repeal of the Clean Air Act, partial repeal of bank regulation legislation, Medicare cuts, cuts in several anti-poverty programs, making it harder to launch medical malpractice lawsuits, more drilling on federal land, blocking net neutrality, and a suite of changes designed to make it harder for regulatory agencies to crack the whip.

Things like this do happen. The British system of government used to feature a ruling monarch who was checked in limited ways by two houses of parliament. Over time, those houses of parliament leveraged their control over tax hikes into overall control of the government. On a somewhat slower time frame, the elected House of Commons nudged the House of Lords out of almost all of its de facto political power. And that’s the House’s proposal here. The president should become an elected figurehead (not dissimilar to the elected presidents of Germany, Israel, or Italy) whose role is simply to assent to the policy preferences of the legislative majority.

They aren’t even pretending to care about democratic representative government. They’re just out to use whatever brute force they have to get what they (or their masters) want.

While Cruz and the Baggers belt out their out-of-tune cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender,” rightie pundits are rehearsing Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare.” But they can’t get the words right.

I give you the increasingly incoherent George Will, who simultaneously believes that Republicans must press their advantage by giving “Democrats a ruinous opportunity to insist upon unpopular things,” like the individual mandate, while at the same time admitting the American people might like Obamacare once it’s started.

It is two minutes until midnight. On Jan. 1, the ACA’s insurance subsidies begin, like a heroin drip, making Americans instant addicts. The Obama administration knows that no major entitlement, once tasted, has been repealed.

Even so, Will proposes that Obamacare could collapse of its own weight. “If the ACA is, as conservatives believe, as unpleasant in potential effects as it is impossible to implement, conservatives should allow what Lincoln called “the silent artillery of time” to destroy it.”

The government should not be closed; the debt ceiling will be raised. Republicans should, however, take to heart the last words of H.L. Mencken’s summation of Theodore Roosevelt: “Well, one does what one can.” Republicans can give Democrats a ruinous opportunity to insist upon unpopular things. House Republicans can attach to the continuing resolution that funds the government, and then to the increase in the debt ceiling, two provisions: Preservation of the ACA requirement — lawlessly disregarded by the administration — that members of Congress and their staffs must experience the full enjoyment of the ACA without special, ameliorating subsidies. And a one-year delay of the ACA’s individual mandate.

By vetoing legislation because of these provisions, and by having his vetoes sustained by congressional Democrats, Obama will underscore Democrats’ devotion: Devotion to self-dealing by the political class, and to the principle that only powerful interests (businesses), not mere citizens, can delay the privilege of complying with the ACA.

Arithmetic, not moral failings, makes Republicans unable to overturn Obama’s vetoes. So after scoring some points, Republicans should vote, more in sorrow than in anger, to fund the government (at sequester levels, a significant victory) and to increase the debt ceiling. Having forced Democrats to dramatize their perverse priorities, Republicans can turn to completing the neutering of this presidency by winning six Senate seats.

First, what is it about right-wingers and their love for florid prose? Do they think that if they crank out rhetoric that smells like a florist’s hothouse we won’t notice their ideas stink?

Second, the business about Congress and their staff being either exempt from Obamacare or the recipients of special subsidies because of Obamacare is false. It’s a figment of wingnut imagination. And there is no way in hell the individual mandate will be delayed, but I think once Obamacare kicks in most people will be OK with it. I think a lot of people still don’t understand that if they get insurance through their employer or Medicare, nothing will change. When January 1 rolls around and the sky does not fall, a whole lot of air will be sucked out of the Obamacare “crisis.”

As for the exchanges, Jonathan Chait writes,

The Obama administration today released the final numbers on the premiums in the state health exchanges. This is the single most important piece of data we have to gauge the plausibility of the exchanges, which are the crucial mechanism of Obamacare. The premiums are not spin, they are the collective judgment of the marketplace. The conservative judgment of Obamacare has been a ceaseless litany of doom — rate shock, fumbling bureaucracy, unreasonable regulations. If that indictment were true, insurers would be charging higher rates than the administration initially forecast. Instead, the premiums are clearly lower than forecast — 94 percent of customers in the exchanges will have the chance to pay below-forecast premiums.

Of course, at Forbes Avik Roy is still cranking out scarey headlines like “Double Down: Obamacare Will Increase Avg. Individual-Market Insurance Premiums By 99% For Men, 62% For Women,” but Roy has gotten so ridiculous lately even Ezra Klein is just ignoring him. As has been pointed out, Roy reaches his conclusions by comparing the lowball introductory prices of really awful, not-even-bare-bones plans offered only to young healthy people in unregulated states to the cost of full-feature insurance offered on the exchanges for those same young people, without factoring in subsidies.

Now, let’s go to Wall Street Journal, where Daniel Henninger says “Let Obamacare Collapse.”

As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This thing called “ObamaCare” carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently.

If ObamaCare fails, or seriously falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with the American people. It will finally be vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.

Himmiger’s hope is that when Obamacare collapses it will take Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid with it, and Americans once and for all will get over the idea that government of the people, by the people, and for the people can respond to the needs of the people.

An established political idea is like a vampire. Facts, opinions, votes, garlic: Nothing can make it die.

But there is one thing that can kill an established political idea. It will die if the public that embraced it abandons it.

Six months ago, that didn’t seem likely. Now it does.

The public’s dislike of ObamaCare isn’t growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe.

The article is accompanied by a cartoon of the “Four Horsemen of the Democratic Apocalypse” — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare.

Hinniger grudgingly concedes that the public came to support the first three “horsemen,” but he thinks the ACA will be the straw that broke the camel’s back — “The discrediting of the entitlement state begins next Tuesday. Let it happen.”

Yeah, let it happen. If it’s that awful, what are they worried about? Or maybe that’s not what worries them …

For those of you (including me) who didn’t have time to waste watching the Cruzathon, TPM provides highlights.