I have been reluctant until now to blog about the government shutdown for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I wanted to get my facts straight. Times like this are always rife with people fulminating against this party or that concern. So, I wanted to make sure that if I was going to say anything about anyone, it would be factually accurate. The second reason is that I don’t want to be taken for a member of either party – oh, Brad’s only saying that because he’s a Republican/Democrat/Libertarian/Green. Actually, I’m none of the above and have no party affiliations. It leaves me free to give credit or to critique either major party without stepping on any interests of my own. Similarly, my views on foreign and domestic policy are both developed and articulate, and either major party would take issue with them at various points depending on the issue. That said, I’ll go on.
Everyone compares this shutdown with the last one – how is it the same and how is it different. That’s understandable seeing as there hasn’t been a shutdown in almost two decades. Still, this shutdown doesn’t remind me much of the shutdown in 1995 to 96. With its protracted duration and its relationship to healthcare-related issues, it reminds me more of the three government shutdowns that took place between September 30 and December 9 of 1977. All of those revolved around whether Medicaid funds could be used to pay for certain types of abortions. I don’t want to go more deeply into that, because I don’t want to spend any time talking about abortion or 1977. After all, I’ve written a whole cycle of blog posts about abortion, none as yet about 1977!
As I have read and read and watched and watched, a couple of things strike me as interesting. First, there are those who lambast President Obama for being a weak and indecisive leader. I’ve had conversations in which he was compared to Jimmy Carter and not favorably. In such conversations I invariably point out two things. First, because of the separation of powers set forth in our constitution—a document I’ve read repeatedly—it is Congress’s sole responsibility to pass budget bills, not President Obama’s, and all other conditions being equal, Obama probably couldn’t have done anything in the immediate past to forestall this particular shutdown. Secondly, President Obama’s refusal to budge--which is to say, he is refusing to allow a minority of lawmakers in one house of government to defund his landmark healthcare law as a condition of reopening the government—doesn’t strike me as weak or irresolute. I don’t agree with everything the man’s done, but liberal and conservative commentators alike seem to agree that capitulation on Obama’s part would be disastrous. Well, it doesn’t look like he’s giving in. Love the man or hate him, how is that weak? I ask you.
The second tendency I’ve noticed is for people to want to blame all of Congress. People talk about Democrats and Republicans acting like children, how the whole congress is to blame, etc. To an extent, this is understandable. There have been plenty of times when extremist elements on both sides of the isle have behaved unreasonably at the same time. Blaming both sides is an impulse that also stems from the American people’s deep-seeded cynicism about government and the people who make up governments. Mark Twain once observed, “politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reasons.” Finally, it seems that some people want to blame both sides because they hesitate to actually name particular groups or individuals. I don’t share this reluctance at all, the caution being that I still want to know what I’m talking about if and when I do name names.
Just the same, if all I wanted to do was name names, I wouldn’t have written this. I want to consider two key points about our government and how it functions or doesn’t function as the case may be. Consider, what does it mean to live in a representative democracy? Among other things, it means that the representatives of the people pass, for the most part, laws that the people want or need. That’s the theory. As with all theories that explain human systems, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Let me review some basic civics. A law passes both houses of Congress and goes to the president’s desk for a signature, and if the bill is sent to him during a congressional session, he has ten days excluding Sundays to sign it. If he signs or ignores the bill, it becomes law. If he vetoes it, called a return veto, it goes back to Congress and has to pass by a two thirds majority in each house if the president is going to be overruled. This majority is hard to come by. Out of 1497 regular vetoes, that is vetoes of the type that could have been overridden by Congress and excluding the pocket veto, only 110 have been overridden, about 7.3%. Just the same, in today’s case we’re talking about the Affordable Care Act, which passed both houses and was signed into law.
If a bill becomes law, there are two ways it can be done away with. One is for the Supreme Court to declare the law unconstitutional. The Supreme Court isn’t required to review any given law; it may decide to do so or else not. The other is for the law to be overturned by later legislation. This is the democratic process as the founders of this country designed it.
Why did I include a mini-civics discourse? I included it, because a small party of extremists in the House of Representatives seems to have forgotten their civics classes! What bothers me most of all, however, isn’t even that Tea Party extremists are leveraging power to keep the government shut down until they get their way including such notables as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Representative Todd Rokita of Indiana, Representative Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan, and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. What bothers me most is how this tactic seems to be regarded as a legitimate thing to do in the way of running a government.
A friend of mine who calls himself an arch conservative once put it to me like this, “they [presumably the Tea Party and its affiliates] know that shutting down the government is a valid tactic they can use, so they’re not afraid to use it.” If that’s true, and recent U.S. history suggests that it may be, then the question becomes, valid in what sense?
What might ‘valid’ mean in this context? Is shutting down the government valid in the sense that it is possible and not in violation of any laws? Given the right set of variables, those being a looming budget deadline and an extremely polarized congress with just the wrong apportionment of votes, yes, you can indeed legally shut down the government. It’s happened almost twenty times in forty years, and it’s happening now. Somehow, however, I don’t think that that definition of valid is the one we ought to go by. Consider this: by that set of parameters, Hitler’s ascension to power and his subsequent transformations of the state into one of totalitarian rule were quite valid. He used the constitution of the defunct Weimar republic against itself to gain power, and he did it legally. Yet, when German history refers to Hitler’s rise to power, the word almost always used is ‘die Machtergreifung’ (seizure of power). Interesting. That suggests to me that just because you can do a thing via the machinery of government, it doesn’t follow that you ought to.
One thing the Democrats have right is this observation, stated so often that I hesitated to include it. The Affordable Care Act passed both houses of Congress. It was signed into law by a sitting president. It was upheld by the Supreme Court, and it survived as a central issue in a national election. Clearly, most of America wants to give it a try. The solution if you don’t like it, then, is to vote enough people into Congress to overturn it through correct use of the legislative process. TO borrow a sound bite from the president, “don’t boo. Vote.”
In conclusion, I have no strong opinions about whether or not the healthcare act will work, because I don’t predict the future. What I can say is that there was vehement opposition to social security, Medicaid and Medicare when they were first passed, and yet millions of people have benefited positively from those programs over the years. What I can also say is that I have a ton of friends and acquaintances who work multiple part-time jobs, who have no access to health coverage and no prospects of any access to health coverage possibly except for the Affordable Care Act. There are millions more like them. Will the law help them? I don’t know, but if it doesn’t, we can always change it. Fairly, democratically and reasonably.
What we should not be doing, however, is allowing a handful of House republican extremists, including the speaker of the house, John Boehner, to use fiscal deadlines and funding stoppages as a means of forcing action on legislation they happen not to like, regardless of what the legislation is. No matter which party does it, that is not democracy. That’s power play with stopped paychecks and closed programs for consequences. I hope and pray that a spirit of reason descends on Congress and that we get back to business as soon as possible. I would have been happy to see the shutdown ended as I wrote this, making this blog post obsolete. ... It seems it's not obsolete.
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