From National Guard headquarters in Burlington, Vt., to the EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., the federal government began shutting down operations for the first time in nearly two decades. More than 800,000 federal employees, including about 5,000 in Vermont, were caught up in a partial government shutdown that also began to curtail services to millions of Americans. Sen. Bernie Sanders and others said the stalemate in Congress could be broken if only House Speaker John Boehner would allow the full House to vote on a Senate-passed bill to keep the government running. House Democrats would join with the handful of moderate Republicans to end the shutdown. Instead, however, Boehner has bowed to a rump group of right-wing Tea Party Republicans trying to use the shutdown to torpedo Obamacare, the new national health care program which on Tuesday began signing people up for health insurance.

“As a result of the Republican shutdown, cancer patients are not getting care they desperately need, 70 percent of the agents in our intelligence community who are protecting us from terrorism have been furloughed, FBI agents are not reporting to work, applicants for Social Security are seeing delays and 800,000 federal employees trying to raise kids and support their families risk losing their paychecks.  This is all because of a right-wing faction of the House Republican Party that wants to hijack the legislative process and defund the Affordable Care Act. That is unacceptable.  Speaker Boehner must allow the entire House to vote on the Senate resolution to reopen the government.  If he does, it will pass and the U.S. government will reopen,” Sanders said.