If a group of Republican members of Congress gets its way, large parts of the US government could stop functioning next week.<\/p>\n
National parks and museums will close. The military won’t get paid. Passports won’t be issued. Government loans to businesses and home-buyers will stop. Safety inspections could be less frequent.<\/p>\n
That’s the threat, anyway. A last-minute deal is still possible.<\/p>\n
Whether the US government even functions now is, of course, a matter of interpretation. It has operated without a formal budget since 2009. Congress has passed a series of temporary bills<\/span> \u2014 “continuing resolutions” \u2014 that have funded government services for a few months at a time, while ideological battles continued to be fought.<\/p>\n The latest continuing resolution, which would keep the government operating until mid-December, was passed last Friday by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. However, it sets a trap for the Democrats by removing funding for the Affordable Care Act<\/span> (“Obamacare”). Republicans have already held 42 votes to try to cancel Obamacare, with no results, so they see defunding as the only way left to get their wish.<\/p>\n The Democratic-led Senate will discuss the bill this week and almost certainly reject it. But even if the Senate approved the bill, President Obama has said he would veto it.<\/p>\n It’s been said that politics is the art of compromise, but this no longer holds true in the United States, where it’s a fight to the death.<\/p>\n America has had one major experience with government shutdown, when Newt Gingrich<\/a> led the Republicans to do so in 1995\u201396. The winner? Their opponent, Bill Clinton, who was re-elected. The losers? Practically everyone else. The people couldn’t get the services they need (200,000 passport applications went unprocessed<\/span>, for example). Government workers were paid months late. Shutting down and restarting the government, in the end, cost taxpayers an extra $1.4 billion. The Republicans’ stunt cost them a few seats in Congress. Gingrich became disliked within his own ranks<\/span> and was eventually<\/span> forced out of his position as Speaker of the House.<\/p>\n If anyone comes out of the current situation OK, it will be Barack Obama. He doesn’t have to worry about re-election. Obamacare is covered by a separate budget and would not be affected by a government shutdown. Obama could, as he so often has, find something else the Republicans want and give it to them, thus getting a critical few members of the other side to back down. There is in fact a great deal of<\/span> disagreement among Republicans over whether a government shutdown is sensible<\/span>.<\/p>\n Complicating matters, though, is a second battle that’s already on the horizon. With or without a budget, by mid-October, the United States will have spent all the money it’s borrowed. Unless taxes are raised (a political impossibility at the moment), Congress must agree to a higher debt limit, or the government must agree to spend less money, or \u2014 most likely \u2014 both. Last year’s fight over the “debt ceiling” was bitter, lasted months and had no real winners. This year, the White House says it’s learned a lesson from that: not to compromise.<\/p>\n Interesting times are ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If a group of Republican members of Congress gets its way, large parts of the US government could stop functioning next week. National parks and museums will close. The military won’t get paid. Passports won’t be issued. Government loans to businesses and home-buyers will stop. Safety inspections could be less frequent. That’s the threat, anyway. A last-minute deal is still … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[27,51,116,29,107],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":240,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions\/240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}We’ve been here before<\/h2>\n