Apparently the new GOP Speaker of the House, MAGA Mike Johnson, is finding that being the lead clown in the House GOP circus comes with heavy responsibilities. His conference is too busy trying to impeach various Biden Administration officials and going on TV to talk about how serious they are about governing that they can’t actually find time to legislate – which is kinda their main job.
So here’s the question – Why is the United States the only nation in the world that goes through this process of shutting the government down when funding lapses? Turns out, there’s a history to this that is important.
Here’s a good explanation for why other countries don’t have shutdowns the way the United States does. It’s from 2018 but the point still holds.
Historically, the US government has often failed to pass its government budget “on time.” This got so bad in the 1970s that Congress did a magic thing and simply moved the start date of the fiscal year from July 1 to October 1, giving Congress three additional months to do its budgeting job.
For a few years, this extended time meant that Congress passed a budget on time. But over the years Congress has become increasingly incapable of meeting their deadlines. But if things were so bad in the 1970s that Congress actually moved the goalpost because it never met its deadline, why didn’t we see real (or threatened) government shutdowns before this?
I present to you Benjamin Civiletti, Attorney General of the United States at the end of the Carter administration.
Ben pretty much singlehandedly created the modern era of government shutdowns when he issued an advisory opinion that said that the government cannot operate until Congress agrees on a spending bill. Before this opinion, it was generally accepted that in the absence of a spending bill, the government could continue to operate on autopilot (continuing current levels of spending but not undertaking new initiatives) until a budget was passed.
Ben died in 2022, at the age of 87. Toward the end of his life, he made it clear that it was not his intent to create the modern “shut it down” default.
I wrote about the broken government budgeting process in March of 2022 (here’s the link if you want to read this again), so I’ll only hit the high spots today.
.When the regular threat of shutting down the government recurs, it is common to hear comments about how “Washington is broken.” But let’s be clear – it’s the GOP that is broken, as the following chart demonstrates. (You can research all of these shutdowns if you want to understand them better.)
To be even more specific –the MAGA “Crazy Eights” in the House GOP conference are driving this bus. Without them, we would still have a challenging problem, but it would be controllable. This current problem is not manageable, and the responsibility lies directly in the lap of the Republican Party which is still in thrall to #PO1135809.
The impact of government shutdowns, both domestically and across the world, is a topic for another day. Today – with a shutdown looming fewer than 10 days away – we would hope to see some progress. But we won’t. How do I know this? Today is a Federal holiday marking Veteran’s Day, and the Congress won’t be in session again until Monday.
La-la-la.
Pitiful. Just pitiful. Thank goodness we've had as many Republican businessmen as presidents as we have recently. Businessmen know how to make the government run smoothly. Oh, wait...
I can only laugh along with you at the craziness of all of this. It beats crying.