The intransigence of the leaders of Congress brought us into a government shutdown and now prevents us from re-opening the government.

The House tries to open things piecemeal but that in unsuccessful. In most cases, the leader of the Senate won’t let his Senate vote on these proposals.

Even when there is some success, there are are unintentional omissions. Yes, pass a bill to pay the soldiers. Oops, they forgot to include death benefits. Pass another bill and hope Harry Reed will consider it and hope we don’t leave out anything that turns out to be important.

The government does lots of things and in most cases we don’t know what will be important in the near future. So we have essential personnel man agencies that lose much of their strength in a shutdown. And then watch the CDC have to make a skeleton staff a little less skeletal to deal with a disease outbreak.

Why not just open it all? Well, the leader of the House won’t let his members vote on that.

John Boehner, are you listening ?