For this latest shutdown you can thank Newt Gingrich.
He was the guy who invented the “who will blink first” game of chicken back in 1995 in the pair of shutdowns against Bill Clinton. That’s when Gingrich wanted significant cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, education, environmental protection, and other social spending along with tax cuts — where have you heard that before? — and triggered a five day shutdown in November and a 21 day shutdown in December to get his way.
That shutdown ended with Gingrich backing down after the media portrayed the Republicans as at fault for the shutdown and Gingrich (in particular) as petulant, with Gingrich having complained publicly complained about being snubbed on Air Force One by Clinton during a trip to Israel for Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral.
But the switch had been set.
Before that there had been the occasional one or two day “shutdown” at the end of budget cycles where the Congress and the President hadn’t finished dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s before a new budget came into effect. But those never caused major disruptions to the functioning of the United States government and never caused people to be furloughed.
It may also be of interest that these kinds of shutdowns never seem to happen in parliamentary governments around the world, where failing to agree on a new budget just causes the old budget to roll over until a new budget is enacted.
Only in America do these disputes lead to shutdowns.
Only in America.
Trump, of course, procured the all-time record for shutdowns in his first administration, a 35 day imbroglio with Congressional Democrats over “border wall” funding, DACA, immigration caps and budget caps.
Trump, Mr. Art of the Deal, eventually backed down on that one.
Will the GOP back down this time again?
I guess we’ll see.
They, of course, are claiming that the Democrats are trying to “give health care to illegals.”
You would think that at some point just lying straight through your teeth would come back to bite you. Hasn’t happened yet.
What the Democrats want is (1) extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, (2) reversing cuts to Medicaid made in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and (3) restoring recissions for previously scheduled funding that the Trump administration unilaterally took out of federal funding (and the Republicans then rubber-stamped).
In other words, they don’t want health insurance to become more expensive for the average American.
Why Republicans want to burden their voters with more expensive health insurance (again, just like in the earlier Gingrich-Clinton dispute), remains a mystery to me.
But J.D. Vance and Republican leadership are out there claiming Democrats want to give healthcare to “illegals” even though they know perfectly well that the undocumented are not entitled to Medicaid, or ACA subsidies, or any other federally-sponsored health care funding.
(Not to get too technical, but in Massachusetts and other states there is something known as the Uncompensated Care Fund, which pays back hospitals when people without insurance walk into their emergency room and receive care that hospitals are federally mandated to provide. Before the enactment of the ACA this was a much larger problem because people with non-emergencies would walk into an emergency room to get some kind of routine medical care, and yes, that sometimes included the undocumented.)
Democratic leadership was roundly criticized by their own voters for backing down to Trump and the Republicans the last time that the federal budget was about to expire. They are well motivated not to let that happen again.
