A federal employee awakes on January 19, 2018 and turns on the TV to see pundits chattering about his livelihood. The government has shut down. His paycheck has been cancelled. His life is about to get a lot more stressful and expensive. And the political class treats this disaster as some kind of reality TV episode.
Close to one million middle-class Americans stand to suffer from the shutdown. Most of them are modestly paid, and the ruling party regularly denigrates their labor as waste. They live in the expensive Washington, DC metro area; their bills are correspondingly costly. Few of them can afford for their finances to be disrupted. This government shutdown will inflict real pain on their lives and those of their children. It’s not just fodder for cable-news entertainment.
American democracy does not deserve such a callous and trivial system. A political class that internalizes the regular shutdown of government is one that has lost touch with the roots of the republic. Honor, responsibility, the faithful stewardship of the public trust: All are abjured in favor of a sickly gamesmanship.
And their approach is precisely that flippant. This shutdown is unnecessary. Unlike in 2013, the parties are not in conflict over fundamental issues. Leaders on both sides agree that DACA should be formalized, and CHIP extended. Responsible leaders could resolve these disputes without difficulty. Especially if they received help from the Oval Office– which is not forthcoming.
Few signs of improvement manifest themselves. Republicans have fully embraced the strategy of hostage taking. Across the aisle, Democrats increasingly seek to reciprocate their opponents’ ruthlessness. This year’s candidates reflect the new symmetry of aggression. Both #Resistance activists and Bannon bomb throwers alike seem packed with pugnacity. Forgive the cliche, but it will get worse before it gets better.
This shameful situation didn’t arrive naturally, like the tides or the sunrise. There is a clear villain: Newt Gingrich. The former speaker, who engineered the first government shutdown, wreck like the Trump Organization toppling a widow’s apartment. Fixing them is the work of a generation.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
By the way: most federal employees do not ” live in the expensive Washington DC area.” The truth is that 79% live outside the DC region. They are not in expensive Washington, DC or Bethesda, Md or Fairfax, Va. There are 200.000 in far off Texas. That is not to take away from any of the argument about federal employees being victims or that shutdowns are bad things. However, I notice that many of the members of Congress talk about this as a Washington, DC (they really love to emphasize that DC) matter. The impact is on almost every community in the country in real economic terms as well as human terms.
Interesting point. Thanks.
Both parties needed to learn that forcing a shutdown as a tactic gets the same result as using hand grenades in close quarters combat. The tactic doesn’t work but most of the public has yet to understand why. It’s simple. Tons of taxpayer dollars flow from the government to the myriad of contractors and business interests, also known as the Donor class…that flow is suspended in a shutdown (which is one reason why I approve of shutdowns, in principle). The Donor class, to which both parties must answer, will not tolerate government shutdowns because it’s bad for business.