Blame

Grover Norquist blames Ted Cruz: ‘He pushed House Republicans into traffic and wandered away’ You have to apply a bit of a filter, but there's some interesting things in his thoughts.

Dylan Matthews blames James Madison, The shutdown is the Constitution’s fault. "Even in this country, there's one state — Nebraska — that abolished its upper house starting in 1937. Omaha did not collapse into a dystopian hellmouth as a consequence. But it's not just that Madison's system is unnecessary. It's potentially dangerous. Scholars of comparative politics have shown that presidential systems with a separation of executive and legislative functions, like America's, are considerably more likely to collapse into dictatorship than are parliamentary systems where the executive and legislative branches are merged. That's because there are competing branches of government able to claim democratic legitimacy and steer the ship of state at the same time — and when they disagree profoundly, there's no real mechanism for resolving the dispute."

Apparently Democrats can use this one weird trick to end the government shutdown, but then there's Why the discharge rule won’t help Democrats on the CR. Even if it can't help til November, it would be nice to put an end-date on this crap. That would be some leverage.

And while the above seem like good articles to me, they're all from WonkBlog. Dan Froomkin makes the case Shutdown coverage fails Americans.