The United
States narrowly averted a government shut down at the last
minute yesterday. If it seems like
we have been there before you are not mistaken.
Going back to President Bill Clinton’s fights with Congressional
Republicans in 1995 there have been 5 total or partial shutdowns
laying off hundreds of thousands of Federal employees, closing
vital services, disrupting
the lives of millions, and costing billions of dollars. In 2013 a total shutdown to spite President
Barack Obama lasted 15 days. In
2018-19 the former Resident of the United States helped engineer
the partial shut down of his own government lasting 35 days believing
that voters would hold Congressional Democrats to blame. He was wrong. The stench fell on him and his
party.
This
time around with the Senate evenly divided requiring all Democrats and
the Vice President to vote pass funding legislation to finance
the government for its next fiscal year Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell threatened to force Democrats to pass the authorization without
Republican support knowing that two obstreperous allegedly moderate Democrats
might not vote for the measure. As the
clock ticked down to the last moments and after furious negotiations an
agreement was made. Republicans were
afraid to take the blame again while allowing their kamikaze crazies to
make their symbolic vote to blow up the economy.
The
Senate and House both passed a short-term appropriations bill that would
keep the government running through December 3. The Senate approved the
legislation in a 65-35 vote, with 15 Republicans joining all 50
Democrats. The House passed the bill by a 254-175 margin as 34 GOP representatives
and every Democrat supported it. Essentially
they just kicked the ball down the road setting up a possible new
crisis in two months.
Earlier
Democrats tried to fund the government and suspend the debt ceiling
as part of the same bill. Senate Republicans blocked the legislation,
even though extending the ceiling doesn’t authorize new spending.
Approval would let the Treasury to cover its existing
obligations.
Failure
to raise the debt ceiling by October 18 when the Treasury will run out of
money to pay its obligations and cause the nation to default on
its debts for the first time could trigger a “financial apocalypse” including a stock market crash,
banking collapses that would trigger a world-wide depression,
soaring interest rates and chocking off business and consumer
credit, an massive unemployment.
So
naturally some Republicans seem content to let that happen to bring the
whole system crashing down so that it can be replaced by supposed
Randian utopia in which powerful elites can plunder undisturbed.
All
of this storm und drang comes as Democrats struggle to unite
their progressives and alleged moderates in passing both Biden’s bipartisan
infrastructure bill and his far more ambitious $3 trillion budget
reconciliation bill including provisions like free preschool
and community college, child-care subsidies, and an expansion
of Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care.
Eight
years ago today I posted a blog entry on the 2013 crisis that seems just
as apt today. Here it is.
Back in the ‘50’s guys with duck tails and souped-up Chevys played two kinds of games of chicken on the dark blacktops outside of town. The classic game had two macho,
testosterone fueled knights
run full speed at one another until at the last minute one swerved
out of the way, pee dribbling down his Levis. Or not, in which case
there would be a swell double funeral.
A rarer variant was
immortalized in James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause—a side-by-side
drag race toward a cliff. As
you will recall, Dean applied the brakes at the last second. The other yahoo sailed serenely
over the cliff to a fiery crash and oblivion. Last night was that kind of game. We could almost celebrate the cleaning
up of the gene pool by the Republicans’ grandiose self-immolation,
except that the rest of us were tied up, bound, and gagged in the
trunk.
The long awaited/dreaded government shutdown is a signal to pundits and bloggers to analyze and
opine with abandon. The conduits
of the interweb are clogged with
it as I type. The product ranges from right wing hair-on-fire hysterics and pants-on-fire lies, to solemn
platitudes and phony even-handedness of the professional talking
heads, to liberal/left commentary
torn between blindly backing the President
to sniping at him and unloading lots of impractical advice on
him.
But here and there you can find a calm
and rational analysis of what is happening, why, and various likely
outcomes. I urge you to find them. They are all better than I could have
done.
Instead I am moved to poetry.
Political verse has the shelf life of sushi on a pushcart in Phoenix
in August. It has a long and
ignoble history since the days when long satirical ballads were printed
anonymously in partisan newspapers, through righteous radicalism
dripping with the blood of workers and peasants, to acid
penned short pieces in the columns of Puck or The New Yorker.
This is none of those, but read it
fast before it evaporates from your screen.
This Morning
October 1,
2013
The sun rose
this morning
heedless of deadlines
of wails and curses.
But that
doesn’t mean
we must sit idle
with Zen-like equanimity.
The dew on
the grass
invites the first footprint.
The crystal
air refreshes
our lungs.
The wind at
our backs
pushes us to action.
What they
have done,
is done.
What we will
do
is yet unwritten.
We have but
one resolve—
not to be pawns
on their chessboard
anymore.
—Patrick Murfin
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