What in the world have we gotten ourselves into?
On Oct. 1, the government shut down, furloughing 800,000 federal employees and forcing tens of thousands of other workers, including prison guards, air traffic controllers and U.S. Border Patrol agents to work without pay.
And we aren’t too far from another crisis — this time of far greater magnitude. As early as Oct. 17, the federal government could hit its borrowing cap of $16.7 trillion, causing the government to default on 40 percent of its obligations. If it does come to that, the government will have to choose which services — Medicare, Social Security, interest on debt, education, courts, the FBI, food safety inspections — it will fund.
A government shutdown means the government will be unable to take on future obligations. Hitting the debt ceiling would make it unable to repay past obligations.
We’ve already got the former. Parks are being shut down. Most of NASA has closed. Workers are being held without pay. But if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, we’ll be in a much worse place. The government will owe money to creditors that it won’t be able to repay, likely causing a financial crisis on the order of billions of dollars. It certainly won’t be pretty.
There’s a long list of people that we can blame. Is it the Republicans, who are holding a government hostage over a single policy they dislike? Is it the Democrats, who seem to be unable to compromise on an unpopular policy they forced through Congress? Or is it us, the voters, who elected them in the first place?
This time, it’s hard to blame anybody but the Republicans for the government shutdown. Instead of being another comprehensive policy bill, the spending bill that should have been passed before Oct. 1 would have just upheld the status quo. It would be like so many other boring bills that Congress passes on a daily basis to keep itself and the government running. But instead of passing the spending bill now and working with the president on Obamacare later, the Republicans decided to use the day-to-day operations of the government as leverage to try and force their own agenda onto the White House.
It’s a strategy that has been used before, 17 years ago, by Newt Gingrich and the then-Republican-controlled Congress. Just like the Republicans today, the Republicans in 1995 thought that the government was spending too much money and that its size needed to be reduced. And, just like the Republican leadership today, Newt Gingrich decided the best way to force Clinton to cut down on programs was to use the debt ceiling and the spending bill as leverage. It didn’t work out very well.
Clinton’s approval ratings rose to 53 percent after the first shutdown of the government — the highest those ratings had been for two years. The public largely blamed the Republicans for the shutdown, and they lost the ensuing 1996 presidential election by an electoral college margin of 159-379, a landslide victory for Clinton.
In the same way, the current Republican strategy of using the government shutdown as a political tactic is nothing short of pointless. Obama has already said he would not sign anything but a clean spending bill without any amendments that would delay the implementation of Obamacare. At the same time, House Republican leaders seem unwilling to pass a spending bill with anything but amendments regarding Obamacare. It may seem like a classic case of partisanship, but in this case, Obama stands firmly in the right.
On “The Daily Show,” host Jon Stewart compares the Republicans to a losing football team that says, “If you don’t give us 25 points on Monday, we will shut down the NFL.” And Stewart is correct. The spending bill is part of the everyday running of our government. Like the regular raising of the debt ceiling, it’s something that we expect to be passed each and every year in order to keep our government functioning. And yet the Republicans seem to be willing to put everything in jeopardy in order to thumb their noses at Obama’s policies.
Regardless of the eventual outcome of the government shutdown, the temper tantrum the Republicans are throwing over Obamacare needs to come to a stop. The Republican leadership will need to learn that negotiations take place when both parties come to a level playing field, not when one party is holding the government hostage over a piece of legislation. And the Republicans will need to learn their lesson fast — before the country hits its debt ceiling — or there will be an entire new set of problems.
It’s the Republicans’ call now. The ball is in their court.
Contact Kevin Gu at [email protected].