If you were negotiating in good faith in order to make budget cuts for the current year – cuts that were so important to the nation’s welfare you were willing to shut down the entire federal government over them – then what sort of provisions would you insist on, regardless of the opposition from the president and the other party?

Surely not a provision adding $100 million to the deficit for a five-year period that won’t start until after the current fiscal year ends. Yet that’s exactly what Republicans demanded be inserted into the 2011 budget bill. In addition to reviving the discredited private school voucher program for the District of Columbia for the rest of this year, it separately authorizes the program for five years beginning in 2012.

This has nothing at all to do with the 2011 budget or deficit reduction. It has everything to do with advancing a right wing ideological agenda to funnel taxpayer money to churches and to privatize public education.

Republicans were willing to threaten Americans throughout the country with the crippling shutdown of our federal government just to advance their right wing agenda however they could.

That’s not deficit reduction; that’s integrity reduction.