Up now at Forbes and leading RealClearPolicy, I’m making the argument that our democracy is moribund if every law that gets passed is hardwired into the government because we’re too scared to defund it:

Elected representatives from both parties ought to break the shackles of fear-soaked propriety more often. So what if, most of the time, their push to defund will be dead on arrival? Establishment types will realize that shutdowns aren’t the horrorshows they dread. And Members of Congress will begin to understand that slavish devotion to party and budget orthodoxy serves neither their conscience nor their constituents.

Earlier today, the Senate, as expected, voted down the House proposal that would have included a one-year delay of Obamacare and repeal of the medical device tax as part of the continuing resolution to keep the government open. There’s now another gambit in the works, per Politico:

House Republicans are moving toward putting a bill on the floor that would delay the individual mandate and cancel health-insurance subsidies for members of Congress, the president and administration appointees, according to multiple sources. That bill would be part of a government funding measure to which the Senate would have to agree. The Senate just rejected the House’s last move this weekend to delay Obamacare and repeal the medical device tax as part of a government funding bill.

Hannah Gais, an editor at the Foreign Policy Association, is one of those people very concerned about too many people. For her, it’s right up there with climate change as an existential threat to humanity, Gaia, the whole shebang. As she writes for U.S. News & World Report: ”If there’s one thing we can agree on, it’s that there are certainly a lot of us. But how much of a growing population can the earth really support – comfortably and without destroying it, that is?”

But Gais isn’t really asking a question here. She is searching for affirmation of her existing belief that, yuppers, there’s too darn many of us. And that affirmation arrives in the form of Alan Weisman, author of the The World Without Us, a thought-experiment that examines what would happen to the planet if all 7.1 billion of us disappeared. (Spoiler: a return to Eden.) Gais: