By Joe Vigil and Virginia Cooper
When this article began, there were assumptions made that it would be a retrospective opinion on the government shutdown.
But no one could have imagined that Congress would let the United States come as close as it did to defaulting on its debt for the first time in history. The House and the Senate agreed on resolutions on Oct. 16 to the government shutdown that included an increase in the debt ceiling that will fund the government through Jan. 15 and sets a new deadline for a resolution for Feb. 7. They came to this resolution because they had to. If they had waited even an hour longer to come to a consensus, the United States would have defaulted. Since the bill has been passed to re-open the government, this only means that the same problems will be prolonged and pushed to a later date.
Had the deadline for a debt resolution not loomed, Congress would have continued the shutdown. The Democrats in the Senate and Republicans in the House both would have refused to make concessions on the Affordable Care Act, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of government workers. Luckily, government workers will be paid for their work during the shutdown, which was a part of the bill.
It certainly seems like the Republicans are primarily to blame for both the shutdown and its duration. President Obama had refused to compromise with the demands that Republicans had made to re-open the Government on the condition that the Affordable Care Act be defunded, saying that “We’re not going to pay ransom for” America paying its bills. Later Speaker of the House John Boehner had the audacity to say, Wednesday Oct. 16, that the Republicans had “fought the good fight, we just didn’t win,” referring to their stubbornness during the shutdown. Republicans did get some of what they wanted, which was to have the government require the eligibility of people receiving federal subsidies under the health care the Republicans favored. However, many House Republicans, such as Kentucky Representative Harold Rogers, were willing to compromise to end the shutdown earlier, but Tea Party Republicans, such as Senator Ted Cruz from Texas, seemed to have an inexplicable amount of influence in the situation for being a minority within a minority. Boehner seemed entirely unwilling to make any move that would rub the Tea Partiers the wrong way.
However, the Democrats are hardly blameless either. They refused to concede on any provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and when the Republicans were finally ready to end the shutdown and negotiate the looming budget deadline, the Democrats attempted to force them into moving on a few of the new deadline dates that had been agreed upon. The Republicans refused, and the shutdown was extended for a day longer than it had to be.
Although the shutdown has been put to a halt, the government still faces possible debt default between now and the beginning of November. The government faces big bills to pay off; including Social Security and Medicare, and the Treasury will have to rely only on the money they currently have to pay these off. Paying any one of these bills would cause us to run out of money and face default. That means the government will actually have to solve the issues at hand, and not put off everything, until once again they are left facing a partial shutdown.
After the shutdown, Oct. 17, President Obama said that “we have to get out of the habit of governing by crisis.” While that is true, the surprising thing about the whole shutdown is how governing was actually accomplished. The government made very little actual progress on any of the issues at hand. The Affordable Care Act is exactly the same as it was when the shutdown started, and the only changes made to the budget were extensions of deadlines. Boehner has said his party will continue the fight against the Affordable Care Act and Cruz, one of the most vocal critics of the Act, said that he would, like the American people continue to “rise up” and fight to “stop this train wreck of (Obamacare).” Congress has apparently learned nothing and seems destined to repeat this showdown in the very near future. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Oct. 17 that “We cannot make this mistake again,” but unless either side of Congress decides to listen to and cooperate with the other, the cycle of government procrastination due to partisanship will only get worse.
