'If It's September...'

There are just five legislative days until the budget deadline, but House Republicans are hurtling the country towards another devastating #GOPShutdown.  For the American people, this repeat performance from House Republicans must feel like the worst kind of déjà vu.  As Quartzputs it:

"If it's September and Barack Obama is the US president, it means the…bills necessary to keep the country's government operating are being held up by symbolic ideological demands made by conservative lawmakers."

Our nation shouldn't have to face a GOP-manufactured crisis every time the Tea Party wants to push its radical agenda.  The American people don't want to relive the disastrous Republican Government Shutdown of 2013 – because they remember just how much that needless ordeal cost their families and our economy.  From CNBC:

Another government shutdown? Here's the cost

Here we go again.

A possible U.S. government shutdown this Friday has once again raised the prospect of throwing federal agencies into chaos, costing taxpayers billions of dollars in lost government productivity, along with a wide range of interruptions that will put a damper on billions more in business and personal financial transactions.

In January 2014, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated the direct impact of the last shutdown, in October 2013, lopped about three-tenths of a percent off real gross domestic product growth in the 2013 fourth quarter….

The 16-day shutdown also sidetracked the creation of anestimated 120,000 new jobs…

…the chaos unleashed from a shutdown would once again be felt by millions of businesses and individuals, as mortgage applications are delayed, vacations to national parks interrupted and payments postponed to tens of thousands of small businesses that do business with the federal government.

Roughly 200 applications for oil and gas drilling permits went unprocessed; the delayed opening of the Alaskan crab fishing season cost fisherman thousands of dollars a day in lost revenue; and more than 2 million liters of beer, wine and other alcohol shipments sat at U.S. ports because the Treasury was not able to issue export certificates…

Consumers and small businesses could also face costly delays if the government shuts down again. In October 2013, the Small Business Administration couldn't process some 700 applications for $140 million in small-business loans, and mortgage applicants couldn't get their income verified by various agencies. Two weeks into the last shutdown, the IRS reported a backlog of 1.2 million verification requests that could not be processed.

The American people shouldn't have to mark their calendars to remind themselves when to brace for the next GOP-manufactured crisis.  It's time House Republicans took the threat of a GOP Shutdown off the table, once and for all.