What have we learned, so far, from the 13 days of shutdown in Washington?
Well, we have learned that the gamesmanship on Capitol Hill knows no bounds.
We have realized that certain ambitious, extortionist politicians are willing to close much of the federal government and potentially blow up the U.S. economy if they don’t get their way.
And we have discovered that getting a leg up on the partisan competition is more important to some of our elected representatives than accomplishing their basic duties of keeping the government running and avoiding a U.S. default. The rest of the world wonders if we are a failing global power, consumed by hyper-partisanship and in inevitable decline.
Over the course of this 2-week charade, we have seen the Republican-controlled House irrationally restore funding for the National Institutes of Health but not for the Centers for Disease Control.
They have backpedaled, providing funding for Head Start but no guarantees for special education.
They put back in place the jobs and pay for military base technicians to provide upkeep of planes and other weapons systems – personnel who will never be deployed overseas – but it took them days to reauthorize Veteran’s Administration funding for troops who were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and came back severely wounded or emotionally scarred.
House lawmakers jumped to restore federal finances for the National Park Service and national monuments but not for the National Forest Service. Since when have the GOP’s most conservative troops expressed any interest in making the national parks a top priority? In the past, they’ve talked about selling them off to the highest bidder.
What’s going on here?
After the congressional Democrats adopted a strident “take it or leave it” attitude for full funding of a temporary budget, the Republicans began backing away from their original position in incoherent ways.
The demand by the House GOP to defund Obamacare morphed into an insistence that the Affordable Care Act mandate for individuals be delayed for one year, just as the business requirements were put off for 12 months.
But, within days, the ACA nearly disappeared from the GOP radar screen and the fight became a skirmish over budget cuts. Then, on Friday, the Republicans said they might restart the government and lift the debt ceiling if certain long-term cuts in entitlements, primarily Social Security and Medicare, are put on the table by the White House.
Meanwhile, the GOP’s crass, piecemeal approach toward easing the shutdown catered to every hot-button issue that arose.
No wonder the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations stumbled, and the subsequent “supercommittee” failed, and the budget “grand bargain” never happened. Congress settled for ill-conceived, across-the-board sequester cuts because they are incapable of prioritizing.
That’s the biggest lesson learned from the shutdown.
The stunts and finger-pointing on Capitol Hill demonstrate that lawmakers are willing to play hypocritical games with any piece of the government.
Under the House Republicans’ drip-drip approach, whatever shutdown impact generates the most heat, the GOP responds with another “micro-bill.”
Kids with cancer? Let’s fund the National Institutes of Health (though we’ve been trying to cut their budget for years). Head Start children losing their seats in the classroom? Let’s give them their money (though we’ve argued repeatedly that the program is ineffective). Border security issues? We’ll finally fix that (though a week has gone by and we’ve said repeatedly in the past that the border is a top priority).
In the early days of the sequester cuts last spring, President Obama learned that small reductions in federal spending have a relatively minimal impact. In the early days of the shutdown, the tea partiers found that shutting down most of the government has consequences. Including political consequences.
Tea party ideologues thought a shutdown would show that Americans can carry on just fine without a whole lot of things that Congress finances with our tax dollars.
They inexplicably planned their crusade without concern for the mission of Defense Department workers or services at the VA or protection of our stockpile of nuclear weapons or death benefits for the families of our fallen soldiers.
This whole farce has shown that the only spending category that makes Congress jump to attention is national defense. The hype surrounding the military monuments is just a game between the administration, which barricaded the sites, and the Republicans, who are outraged that their cutoff of funding closed the Washington monuments.
The rebel lawmakers somehow didn’t consider that most government programs and services don’t have a coast-to-coast, all-encompassing reach. Instead, they help certain sectors of the economy and specific factions of the population. Though many agencies are deemed “non-essential” they still have an impact, either day by day, or in the long run.
Guaranteed loans to small businesses, NASA research, lending to farmers, permits for oil and gas drilling – these are among the non-essentials that remain dormant because there is no loud clamor from the public.
Beyond the selective shutdown, the taxpayer is getting duped, believing that somehow big cuts in little slices of the budget will save them big bucks.
Consider this: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the nation’s federal prosecutors, our anti-terrorism and bioterrorism corps, child support enforcement, housing for the elderly and handicapped, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the National Weather Service – they are all vitally important. And each costs the average taxpayer less than $1 per month.
Highways, sewers, drinking water, law enforcement, protection of our waterways – those are functions handled by the states, largely with money that flows from Washington. The impact of the shutdown now threatens to trickle down and lead to tens of thousands of furloughed workers at the state level.
In Utah, one of the reddest of the Red States, the Republican governor is outraged by the “devastating” closure of national parks and public lands. Those federally maintained sites generate most of Utah’s $7.4 billion in annual tourism dollars.
Across the nation, the shutdown of 400 national parks is costing the economy $76 million a day.
And through it all, Senate Democrats who support each of these programs have stubbornly refused to fund them because they want the Republicans to surrender. Unconditional surrender, with full funding for every department and agency.
The political theater that plays out on the Washington stage has produced one ironic plot twist.
In the noisy controversy that followed the tea partiers’ insistence on defunding or delaying Obamacare, the embarrassing mess that tainted the rollout of the online health exchanges was largely overshadowed by the brinksmanship on Capitol Hill.
If the GOP leadership had ignored Sen. Ted Cruz and his band of bloviating brothers, if they had stuck to a more coherent script, the dysfunctional ACA launch would have been the national story. And they would have positioned themselves perfectly to take the national stage and call for a 1-year delay in Obamacare for individuals.
Instead, they followed a group of fools who chose to engage in self-inflicted drama. For the GOP, that’s not a parody. That’s a tragedy.
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