Amid the usual posturing from both parties in Congress, one side in this week’s government shutdown theater has been much more reasonable. By every historical standard, it is not the Democrats but the Republicans, with Louisiana Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise as their primary spokesmen, who have been dealing straight.
By very definition and by all procedural realities, the side that votes not to keep government open is the one that is “shutting down the government.” This is not complicated: A vote to finance government operations is, yes, a vote to finance government operations. Every Republican in the House and Senate voted to finance government operations, while the votes against the funding all came from Democrats.
Granted, sometimes one side will try to insert nonessential policy choices onto basic appropriations bills. Still, if those policy choices are not usually handled via such appropriations bills, and if they are controversial, then the side insisting on them is ceding some of the procedural-moral high ground.
Keeping the government open only by making the opposing side swallow what amounts to a poison pill is usually considered (forgive the mixed metaphor) to be somewhat dirty pool.
This, though, is where Speaker Johnson’s consistent message has been so right on target, and where Republicans in general have been on the side of angels. Johnson keeps noting that the Republicans have been trying to keep the government open through Nov. 21 via what is known as a “clean” continuing resolution: Current government spending levels and rules, across all agencies, would stay the exact same while negotiations continue, with no extraneous policy issues included.
In this latest battle, Democrats have been rejecting an absolutely clean bill, even though it continues spending levels liberal enough that it is the same amount signed into law by former President Joe Biden. There are no poison pills from the Republicans, period. Instead, it is the Democrats who have been trying to add an extraneous policy change that Republicans see as a poison pill. Coming from a party that is the minority in both chambers of Congress and not in power at the White House either, that takes real gall.
In this case, Democrats are making numerous demands, the biggest one involving an extension of special COVID-era health care tax subsidies never intended even by the original 2010 law, colloquially known as Obamacare. As The Wall Street Journal editorialists note, the Democrats’ demand would add $450 billion in debt (spread over 10 years) on an already dangerously debt-laden budget.
And, as Scalise repeatedly stressed all week, it is undeniable that the alternative pushed by Democrats would repeal multiple sections of law that prohibit federal health care funds from going to illegal immigrants. Those provisions actually are a small part of the repeals pushed by Democrats, but the plain language of the Democrats’ bill does exactly what Scalise claims. And yes, overall, the simple fact is that it is the Democrats pushing for multiple changes in unrelated laws while holding the rest of the government hostage.
Even if you agree with the Democrats’ policy aims in all this, the means they have chosen, namely a government shutdown instead of agreeing to a clean continuing resolution while negotiations continue, is one that for decades they and the media have shrieked against if Republicans even considered employing it under different (and arguably more excusable) political circumstances.
Forgive the personal references, but I’ve experienced government shutdowns from two angles. First, as a Reagan White House appointee to the Veterans Affairs, I and 500,000 other federal employees were furloughed for a day because Congress failed to pass spending bills on time. The second angle came when I was working on the House Appropriations Committee under Louisiana’s own Bob Livingston, when President Bill Clinton vetoed our bills because he said we weren’t spending enough money.
This is thus a system that, from hard experience, I know well.
In every single shutdown I can remember, the gold standard for fair and responsible legislative action — as Democrats themselves have said for years and years and years — is a clean continuing resolution of the sort Johnson and Scalise pushed through the House. There is no good excuse for Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to keep urging his colleagues to shut down the government.
It was not a Republican but Democratic Rep. Jared Golden of Maine who said on Wednesday that “This government shutdown is the result of hardball politics driven by the demands far-left groups are making for Democratic Party leaders to put on a show of their opposition to President Trump.”
Or, as Scalise said on Fox News on Thursday, “Don’t hold the American people hostage while Chuck Schumer has a tantrum.”