I find this hard to believe, but hard-to-believe things are happening right and left these days.

Mainly right.

Now, I may be reading this wrong, but House Republicans appear to be eying the so-called Vitter amendment as their escape hatch from this little problem that they've created for themselves. The idea is that they'll pass a continuing resolution with one amendment attached, an amendment that strips congressional staff and members of Congress, and maybe White House staff as well, of the employer-provided health-insurance contribution that has been part of their compensation package for decades.

Their theory is that the Senate won't dare to reject such a proposal. If it does, Republicans would accuse them of voting to keep the rest of government closed in order to save their own health insurance, and the optics of that would be unsustainable. (The notion is explained in much more detail here.)

If that conjecture proves accurate, conservative Republicans won't be able to claim that they got ObamaCare defunded or delayed, but they'll at least have a scalp to wave to justify all this stagecraft. They can tell their folks back home that at least they stripped their staffs of the same type of health-insurance contribution that more than 170 million other Americans also enjoy through their jobs. In the case of a staffer with a family who is being paid $40,000 a year, it would in effect represent a pay cut of some 25 percent.

That will have been their grand and noble accomplishment, stealing health insurance from working people in order to cover their own incompetence.