The Senate voted down a measure to keep the government running into mid-November today, increasing concerns that a government shutdown is possible should lawmakers be unable to pass a budget by September 30th. Senate Democrats roundly rejected the $1.043 measure, which included $1.5 billion in disaster aid. House Majority leader Eric Cantor and House Speaker John Boehner, who have already been forced to revise their bill because of opposition in their own party, are complaining that Senate Democrats are going back on their word, "playing politics" with money for disaster victims. Cantor and Boehner, as well as other Republican leaders, seem to be playing some politics of their own. These kinds of rhetorical and ideological fencing matches were precisely what held up budget appropriations this summer, which lead to a near government shutdown and, ultimately, the first-ever downgrade in the U.S. credit rating.

The fact the Republicans are not mentioning is that the $1.5 billion in disaster aid is being offset by an equal cut to a fuel-efficiency fund by the Energy Department, a pet program of Democrats. The Senate Democrats, who GOP leaders insist are playing games, have actually submitted their own budget measure with $6.9 billion in disaster relief aid. The only difference is that it does not including federal spending cut offsets, which isn't likely to get past House Republicans.

So here the U.S. taxpayers are left, waiting for a spending-cut-averse Democratic Party and a spending-cut-happy Republican Party, to attempt to find some fiscal consensus before the machinery of our government grinds to a halt without the monetary fuel to keep running. Instead of looking for common ground, they resort to political gimmicks and finger-pointing. A nearly identical, if much smaller in scope, problem to what we watched play out less than two months ago.

We can expect this melodrama to play out again and again in Washington until the 2012 elections clean house unless one of two things happen. If the Republican leadership stops attempting to pander to the more ideologically extreme Tea party contingent within their ranks, and instead go after Blue Dog Democrats and moderates, we'll see a drastically different (and drastically improved) climate in Washington. However, the likelihood of that happening is slim to none in an election year where rhetoric and partisanship seem to be garnering votes from a highly unhappy constituency. The other possibility, is that the ultra-conservative new center of the Republican Party will eventually raise such ire amongst the middle-class workforce that they get an actual taste of class warfare; in which I can't see their platform of corporate welfare and middle-class tax increases playing out in their favor. With an equally popular movement against the Tea Party, Republicans will need to move more center to avoid being cleared out in 2012.

Either way I see congressional Democrats as a non-starter throughout, and will likely only put their skin in the game when they know that unhappiness with Republicans is higher than their own sorry approval ratings. It becomes a question of whether we're willing to bear major cuts to social programs and tax increases when many of the middle-class are already struggling, or to continue to fund ourselves into a possible economic hurricane in the near future. Such is the current political landscape; our choices are to keep digging the hole, or bury ourselves in it.