Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy speaks to the media about efforts to pass appropriations bills and avert a looming government shutdown, at the Capitol in Washington on Sept. 29.Mariam Zuhaib/The Associated Press
The looming threat of a government shutdown in the United States is not merely the failure of Congress to provide funding for federal operations. It also represents a broader failure of the American political system.
And the prospect that – amid the funding crisis the country faces – Republican rebels might topple the Speaker of the House only adds to the upheaval that characterizes Washington less than nine months after Kevin McCarthy required 15 ballots to win the gavel he holds so tentatively.
The very group of GOP conservative hardliners who held up Mr. McCarthy for concession after concession in January are at the centre of both the September drama surrounding the Speaker and the conflict on government spending.
Some of them want to trim more than US$100-billion in federal discretionary spending. Some do not want a catch-all spending bill, known as a “continuing resolution,” at all, and instead want to vote on separate spending bills for various governmental functions. And some simply are enjoying the pressure the imbroglio is putting on Mr. McCarthy, whose speakership has been in danger from the moment he won it, and on U.S. President Joe Biden, who technically is not involved but who may be collateral damage in these disputes.
The resolution of the Speaker’s future is likely a few days away. The government shutdown is only hours away.
There are institutional reasons why the country is facing its 15th shutdown in the last third of a century. The American Founders deliberately created a balky system for all government functions and in subsequent decades the federal funding process became ever more complicated. But the factors contributing to the shutdown that could occur as soon as 12:01 ET Sunday morning are the result of the interests and impulses of 21st century lawmakers, not the imaginings of men in knee breeches, frock coats and powdered wigs.
“There’s been an assault on government for decades, and this gamesmanship is very destructive for a lot of people – and not only the people who work in the government,” said Susannah Bruns Ali, a onetime government policy analyst who now teaches at Florida International University. “There’s a trickle-down effect that affects government contractors who aren’t going to get paid and members of the public whose services will be delayed. This is a huge portion of the economy, and there is hurt around.”
Explainer: With a U.S. government shutdown looming, here’s what’s at stake and what happens next
The toll of a government shutdown won’t be counted only in bureaucrats’ and military employees’ paycheques delayed, museums closed, flights delayed, passports not issued, and food-safety inspections postponed or cancelled – a small sampling of the governmental functions that could be affected. The toll in confidence in American political institutions and in the country’s leadership class cannot be quantified, though it is hard to contemplate it falling far below the 19 per cent approval rating Congress received the last time the Gallup Poll surveyed the public on the subject.
“The system as a whole is the real loser,” said Roger Porter, who served in the administrations of presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and who for decades has taught the revered American Presidency course at Harvard. “Democracies need to have the trust and confidence of the people. When you lose that trust and confidence, it’s very hard to get it back.”
That trust and confidence erodes with every governmental shutdown. Six decades ago, president Lyndon Johnson was able to speak casually of “the majesty of this great government” – an unremarkable aside in his 1965 speech asking Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act but a comment no political figure would issue today, in part because so many American politicians have run for positions in government by running against the government. One of them was Ronald Reagan, during whose presidency the government endured eight shutdowns.
The phenomenon of a shuttered government was unknown before 1980; until then, Washington simply continued to operate during lapses in congressional funding. But once Jimmy Carter-era attorney-general Benjamin Civiletti argued that federal agencies couldn’t operate without appropriated funding, government shutdowns became one of the tools of lawmakers willing to put the country’s finances, and its credit ratings, in jeopardy in the service of other goals.
This time the threat of a shutdown grows out of disputes in three dimensions: within the Republican Party, between the House and the Senate, and between congressional Republicans and the Biden administration.
Two of those three disputes might be easily muted; establishment politicians abhor a shutdown, dread the contempt of the public and fear the effects of angry voters at the next election. “Shutting down the government isn’t an effective way to make a point,” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, said on the floor this week. “Keeping it open is the only way to make a difference on the most important issues we are facing.”
But deep, bitter and perhaps irreconcilable rifts within the Republican Party account for the transformation of this juncture from a shutdown to a shout-down.
Another factor: the inevitable involvement of Donald Trump, still smarting from the 34-day government shutdown, the longest in American history, that occurred during his presidency. Mr. Trump also is aggrieved because his allies, who forced significant spending cuts in the late-spring Capitol Hill conflict over extending the country’s debt limit, nonetheless did not get all the cuts they set out to achieve.
“The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed, in this case, Crooked (as Hell!) Joe Biden!” Mr. Trump early this week wrote on Truth Social, his social media network. “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN! Close the Border, stop the Weaponization of ‘Justice,’ and End Election Interference.”
Confrontations of this sort are one of the peculiarities of the American political system, with no analogue in Canada.
“We don’t have government shutdowns because we don’t have the hard-edge reminders of fiscal overstretch the Americans have,” said William Robson, CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute. “Sometimes I think these reminders might be a salutary thing. You can either have a representative government that takes fiscal responsibility seriously and runs into barriers that cause these crises, or you can have the kind of formal controls we have in Canada but get bypassed. Pick your poison.”