It was President Jimmy Carter’s second attorney general, a lawyer from Peekskill named Benjamin Civiletti, who made the decision that government must shut down whenever there is a so-called “lapse of appropriation.” And so it has: 22 times since the current budget process was enacted in 1976, we’ve had a situation where a political impasse on Capitol Hill has forced the government to curtail activities and services – to close down non-essential operations and furlough workers. Only public officials whose jobs involve the safety of human life or the protection of property – like air-traffic controllers – can keep working if the government shuts down. That’s the Civiletti rule, and it’s still in effect.
And it’s about to happen again. A tiny cluster of ultra-rightwing Republicans are insisting that they won’t go along with any spending compromise for the fiscal year that’s about to begin – and they wield power because they have enough votes to take the speaker’s gavel away from Kevin McCarthy. You’ll remember that McCarthy already last spring forced the White House and the Democrat-led Senate to accept deep spending cuts to avert a Republican threat that would have led to shutting down the government and the U.S. defaulting on its debt.
So let’s be clear who’s to blame here: This is not a bipartisan standoff. It’s not that Democrats want to spend more and Republicans want to spend less, and they’re both refusing to back down. No, there already was a bipartisan compromise, and now the right flank of Republican House members is backing away from it – with the support of Donald Trump, who just loves to break things.
It was during the Trump presidency that we went through the longest of the 22 prior shutdowns – 35 days that time, caused when Trump insisted on including $5.7 billion in a supplemental budget bill for a wall along the southern border. That amount, it turned out, was about what the shutdown cost taxpayers. There was lost tax income due to the economic slowdown that occurred, there were revenues lost due to such impacts as curtailed attendance at closed national parks, and there was back pay that had to be laid out eventually to federal employees who were pushed out of work. During those five weeks of shutdown at the end of 2018, some 380,000 federal workers were furloughed, and about 420,000 more were required to work without pay. Many of them had to find other temporary work to pay their bills. There were reductions in SNAP payments – that is, foodstamps – which led some poor families to lose their grocery money. And the IRS couldn’t process about $140 billion worth of tax refunds. Oh, this too: The FBI reported that a number of investigations were at risk – we don’t really know what might have slipped through the cracks there – and some airports had to be closed because of TSA worker shortages. And as a result of all that, the nation’s economic growth was curtailed by billions of dollars.
That’s what we’re facing again, folks. And for what?
Well, that’s not clear. The dozen or so hardliners in the House won’t even support a starting-point plan McCarthy advanced that itself wouldn’t have a realistic chance of passage in the Democratic-led Senate, or win the signature of President Biden. These right-wingers blocked the Pentagon budget this month in part because the bill didn’t include a rider to cut funding for the FBI — which, you know, folks, is not in the Department of Defense.
So the shutdown is coming because of a refusal to govern – a determination by people elected to government positions that they won’t engage in the give-and-take that is essential to governing, because it requires compromise, which is how disputes are resolved in a democracy. The right wing is saying, in effect, that they’d rather blow up the American government than allow it to function at a level acceptable to the majority of us.
That my-way-or-the-highway approach is what’s drawing cheers for Republican presidential candidates in primary states these days. And shame on those candidates, led by Donald Trump, and on the party for encouraging it. It’s not about problem-solving – it’s about the emotional high that we get when our biases are affirmed, or the thrill of imagining that your enemies getting their comeuppance.
No wonder a recent Pew Research study found that only 4 percent of U.S. adults think the political system is working very well – and almost two-thirds say they have not much or no confidence at all in the future of our system. They’re mostly right: the system isn’t working, obviously – because a functioning political system wouldn’t be so hobbled in its decision-making so as to have to shut down the government.
It is a self-reinforcing cycle, because democracy works only if enough of us believe that democracy works. If we hate government – which, really, is what a lot of right-wing politicians have been encouraging ever since the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan – then our government won’t have enough citizen support to get its job done.
Yet, ironically, government does work. It builds roads and airports, it defends our borders, it redistributes wealth to support the needy, and it regulates financial markets to protect investors. Government guards our natural environment, funds community development and protects public health. It doesn’t do any of that perfectly – we all have disappointments with what our government does, or strong opinions about what it ought to be doing. But the answer isn’t to stomp our feet and walk away from government, as the Republican right is doing; it’s to come together to make our democracy work better.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.