On Dec. 21, the federal government partially shut down over a funding dispute between Congress and the White House. It seems that funding shortfalls are no longer over major policy disputes, but have devolved into petty gamesmanship between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C.
A 21-day shutdown over the 1995-96 New Year’s holiday was centered on a fight that stemmed from a decision between whether budget numbers should come from the Congressional Budget Office or the president’s Office of Management and Budget.
mericans blamed Republicans more than then-Democratic President Bill Clinton — whose poll numbers dropped slightly then rose to the highest of his presidency afterward — for the shutdown. The positive was that the federal government had its first balanced budget since the 1920s.
However, the fallout scared federal lawmakers into avoiding a shutdown for a generation.
That fear subsided in 2013, when the Republican-led Congress used a 17-day shutdown to oppose the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. It was not based on a major disagreement over how to best run our government, but rather a dispute between the liberals and conservatives: One group had earlier passed a major health care bill and the opponents who had opposed it were still bitterly trying to win a fight over legislation they had earlier lost.
The state of Arizona, dependent on tourism for our economic survival, wound up paying the federal government $93,000 per day to keep Grand Canyon National Park open for tourists.
Given the tumultuous nature of modern partisan politics, that shutdown was not seen as a failure to lead but as a tactical tool to tighten the screws on the opposing party.
A government shutdown is now part of the playbook for one party to force the other to cave or risk backlash from voters. That became apparent in September 2015, when Congress and the White House avoided a potential shutdown during a battle for federal funding for Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit that provides reproductive health, maternal and prenatal health services to women with about 5 percent of its budget for abortion services. Thus, the entire government nearly shut down over theoretically funding a small percentage of services for one organization. Yet that argument was absurd considering abortion services cannot receive federal funds anyway due to other federal laws, but fighting abortion plays well with some voters, so the shutdown loomed.
nly a last-minute power play by outgoing Speaker of the House John Boehner [R-Ohio] to resist the social conservative wing of his party avoided the shutdown.
Now shutdowns are common political tactics. There have been three in 2018: A two-day shutdown in January to include immigrant protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a nine-hour “funding gap” on Feb. 8 based on disagreement over raising the debt ceiling and the current shutdown over the White House’s insistence on funding for a border wall Democrats in Congress say they will not fund.
We can expect more of these shutdowns in the next two years as Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives to Democrats, who are less likely to want to work with a White House they were elected to oppose.
We Americans are an adaptable people and have acclimated to these periodic shutdowns, knowing they are political tactics without substance and merely harm the simple functions of our central government. With every shutdown, both liberal and conservative lawmakers prove they are unable to govern in a scorched earth political environment where even the basic functions of our government become tools for the parties to score insignificant political wins against each other which they tout like trophies on Sunday talk shows or at the biennial ballot box.
In drafting our Constitution, the Founding Fathers assumed lawmakers would use logic and passion to battle on the floors of the chambers and keep our government functional, not use our institutions like clubs. This petty foolishness only ends when we tell lawmakers to act like adults and keep government functioning no matter how much they disagree.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
