NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {‘F} or all practical purposes for D.C., the federal government has been shut down since March 9, 2020,” the D.C. Policy Center’s Yesmin Sayin said recently as the prospect of a government shutdown loomed ever larger. “So, it really doesn’t matter as much.”
That quote forms the basis of Politico’s Capital City columnist Michael Schaffer’s latest piece. For residents of the District and the surrounding suburbs, the remote-work lifestyle ushered in by the pandemic ensures that a government shutdown will have few practical consequences in the lives of all but non-essential federal employees. It’s possible that Washingtonians might not even notice the shutdown, Schaffer notes, which bodes ill for Democrats who hope to make a Republican-induced work stoppage as visible as possible:
Smart-set types mock the federal lifers’ lanyards and bureaucratese, but the further our public servants are out of view, the easier it is to dismiss the entire venture — particularly in a country like this one, where so much of government takes the form of subsidies and grants and other ways of obscuring Uncle Sam’s role in programs that people actually like.
The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger offered a similar observation earlier this week in a column that wondered if anyone would “notice” the government shutdown. “We understand the concern about paychecks not going out to Border Patrol agents and the like, but the government-shutdown scenario usually evokes images of Washington itself turning into a ghost town,” Henninger noted. “Guess what? It’s already empty.”
Although the absence of a meaningful number of federal employees from the capital limits the Democratic president’s capacity to maximize the theatrics of a shutdown, it’s not as though Biden is entirely bereft of tools to make a shutdown hurt. What’s more, it’s reasonable to assume that the press will be creative in its effort to ensure that its audiences are aware of the pain that accompanies a shutdown.
If the Biden administration adopts the Obama White House’s shutdown playbook, Americans won’t be able to avoid the consequences of a shutdown — to say nothing of the internecine Republican political squabbles that produced it. The Obama administration maximized the number of inconveniences Americans experienced during a 2013 fight over government funding by closing off access to open-air monuments and memorials. The furloughed federal employees were eventually granted backpay by Congress, but not before they were promoted by Democrats and their allies in media as living examples of the GOP’s callousness. Veterans were threatened with the prospect that their benefits would be denied them for the duration of the shutdown — a threat that did not materialize, but had its intended effect.
We’re already seeing the predictable trajectory a shutdown will take with the sudden discovery that something called “Fat Bear Week” exists. As ABC News reported with palpable remorse, the National Park Service will be forced to cease its regular updates on the growing girth of America’s ursine population in the event of a shutdown. Suddenly, something no one paid much attention to previously has been retroactively deemed indispensable. Its absence from public life will be acutely felt despite the obscurity in which it languished when the government was operating as normal.
The discretionary nature of the pain Obama sought to inflict on the country to make an example of the GOP’s intransigence was exposed by the Trump White House, which did everything in its power to minimize the impact of a two-day government shutdown in January 2018 that occurred despite total Republican control of all the levers of power in Washington, D.C.
The Republican lawmakers who have sought and seem likely to get a government shutdown are unlikely to realize any of the benefits they imagine from it. Executive agencies have broad latitude to determine who is and is not “essential,” and the Justice Department has shielded over 84 percent of its staff from furloughs. Its work, including its ongoing prosecutions of Donald Trump, will not be impeded.
Nor will the Pentagon cease its efforts to support Ukraine’s defense against the Russian onslaught. “Operation Atlantic Resolve is an excepted activity under a government lapse in appropriations,” said Defense Department spokesperson Chris Sherwood on Thursday.
Florida representative Greg Steube told Fox News this week that, nevertheless, it’s still crucial to shut the government down if only to put the federal government on a more sustainable fiscal path. The opposite is more likely. The GOP’s leverage declines with every hour that the government remains closed. By contrast, Republicans can and have secured concessions from Democrats on spending — as Kevin McCarthy demonstrated a mere five months ago — when they choose to engage in sharp-elbowed but nonetheless constructive negotiations.
But Republicans aren’t negotiating with Democrats; they’re negotiating against themselves. And the sticking point isn’t spending or the border or the validity of the cause for which Ukrainians are dying. It’s a dispute over who should lead the Republican conference and how much influence the party’s firebrands should have over the GOP’s evolution. For them, a shutdown is a win-win proposition. If McCarthy is blamed for the shutdown, so much the better. If the GOP writ large is on the receiving end of the public’s frustration, the shutdown’s architects are insulated in safe Republican seats. What’s more, a smaller conference is easier to hijack than a majority coalition. And if by some miracle the shutdown succeeds in putting Democrats on the defensive, the party’s demagogues can take credit for it.
In the interim, the Republican Party’s radicals are handing the Biden administration a weapon the White House will wield against them and their putative allies in the GOP. The pain they feel will be as acute as the president wants it to be — at least, until the GOP cries uncle. And when House Republicans capitulate, as they eventually must, the architects of the shutdown will accuse their conservative colleagues of lacking the will to “fight” a losing battle. Everyone wins! Everyone, that is, except the public and the GOP.