Why is the Federal Government Shut Down?

 As I draft this essay, the federal government has been shut down for 26 days, the second longest shutdown in the 249-year-history of the United States. As can be understood, Republicans blame Democrats for the shutdown, and Democrats blame Republicans. Victor Davis Hanson shared some interesting thoughts on the reason(s) for the shutdown. 

Ostensibly, government shutdowns occur when the out party has lost power in the House and the Senate, or at least they can’t push through an agenda.

So, they feel that the only leverage they have, usually when they’ve lost the presidency and control of the Congress, is to not approve. And basically, that is not approve of any bills that are going on filibusters. In this case, the Republicans do not have 60 votes in the Senate to override their refusal to vote on the budget, so to speak.

Why are they doing this? Why are the Democrats shutting down the government when we have a history of these shutdowns?

And if you go back and look at them, usually one thing happens. That is, initially, the party that’s in the minority and has shut down the government says, “Well, they won’t speak to us,” or “They won’t, they don’t, wanna negotiate,” or “They’re spending too much money and this is the only recourse we have.” [Does this sound familiar?]

And that is a believable message, a persuasive message for a few days, but then certain things kick in, such as: I didn’t get my Social Security check. I didn’t get my paycheck. The air traffic control system is slowing my flights down. And the system slowly starts to grind down….

I think we’re at that point now where the Democrats are seeing a diminishing return on their investment of shutting the government down.

Why did they do this? The historian Thucydides said, for most disagreements, there is the pretext, the prophasis, and then there’s the real cause, the aitia.

They say that they’re shutting the government down because when they passed the Obamacare program, the Affordable Care Act – which, remember, was supposed to reduce everybody’s health care….

But when this program did not prove to be affordable, as everybody predicted it wouldn’t, when you rang a lot of people into the system that can’t pay for it, and you put these rules and regulations on the medical profession, something has to give. And that give was cost.

So, then the Democrats came back and said, “We need subsidies.” And the Republicans said, “Well, you said it was going to be cheaper. Why would you need government multibillion, hundreds of billion-dollar subsidies?” And so, they said, “We’ll put a time limit on it.” Well, that time limit expired or will expire.

And they knew that. They signed on to get us this far into the year by agreeing not to shut down.

So now they say the official reason is the Republicans are not going to extend a subsidy for the affordable health care…

So, that’s the pretext, but there’s two other reasons. One, in the general chaos of things, they think that it hurts the end party, in particular, President Donald Trump….

The other real reason that they’re not telling us is that the Democratic Party is in a doom loop. In other words, on all of these main issues – defund the police, open borders, illegal immigration, the trans sports issue, what we saw abroad, pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas versus Israel – they’re on the losing side, and they do not have a charismatic President Bill Clinton or President Barack Obama to carry them through in a nationwide referendum on these unpopular votes.

So, they don’t have the leadership and they don’t have the votes. And so, they’re looking for something to do, as I said, to cause chaos.

But more importantly, they have a reason why they don’t have charismatic leaders, and they have a reason why they’re unpopular. And that is the party has passed the establishment by. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, all of ‘em are ossified, calcified dinosaurs. And a young group of Mamdanis are running on issues that, while they may be popular in a particular jurisdiction or an East Coast liberal city, they have no residents nationwide.

And they will be running for office in the midterms. They’re gonna be challenging incumbents like Chuck Schumer. And they can win in this neosocialist, DEI, far left, Green New Deal constituency.

But the old guard is saying: They will lose in a general election…. So now, we’re going to shut down the government so they can tell the base, “We’re just as radical as you are.”

And who’s the loser in the final analysis? The American people because the Democratic Party, who shut the government down, is basically saying: We are Samson and we’ve got a hand around each pillar and we’re gonna pull down the whole thing on top of you.