The Republicans certainly should know better than to attempt to tether Obamacare defunding language to legislation seeking to raise the debt ceiling. There are many examples of such attempts through the history of the 20th century. They almost always fail, as the desire for a “clean bill” for such measures is uniformly desired.
So either John Boehner et al are horrible students of history, or they’re counting on the short memories of the voting public to pull off the highly improbable. In either case, the negative effects of the shutdown are being incrementally mitigated by democratic creativity in keeping people working, as evidenced by the order for furloughed employees to be immediately returned to work with retroactive pay.
The last time the government shut down like this, according to Wikipedia, was in 1995 after then-president Bill Clinton vetoed the spending bill the Republican-controlled congress had sent him as it contained Medicare spending cuts that he would not agree to:
“The United States federal government shutdown of 1995 and 1996 was the result of conflicts between Democratic President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress over funding for Medicare, education, the environment, and public health in the 1996 federal budget. The government shut down after Clinton vetoed the spending bill the Republican Party-controlled Congress sent him. The federal government of the United States put non-essential government workers on furlough and suspended non-essential services from November 14 through November 19, 1995 and from December 16, 1995 to January 6, 1996, for a total of 28 days. The major players were President Clinton and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.”
The first time a limit was established on the amount of debt the United States of America could borrow was in 1917, and has been raised continuously since then. The United States has been in debt every single year of its existence except 1835. The debt ceiling has been raised 74 times since 1962.
A Google search for “debt ceiling” in the news archives is an education in political theatre, as during the last hundred years, the requirement for legislation to raise the debt ceiling has provided persistent opportunity to attach unpopular legislation to the bill as amendments – almost always unsuccessfully.
On February 2nd, 1967, the Ways and Means Committee voted to approve a $6 billion increase in the national debt to $336 billion after the Committee voted down a Republican-sponsored amendment that would have included more of the Johnson administration’s fundraising operations in the national debt.
On December 4, 1973, Richard Nixon signed a bill into law that raised the debt ceiling to $475.7 billion after sponsors of an amendment seeking to permit the public financing of presidential and congressional campaigns agreed to drop the amendment. The article, from the Pittsburg Post-Gazetter, said that the United States “faced bankruptcy” the next day if the measure was not passed.
Government Dysfunctionality
The bottom line here is that this is the best case of the dysfunctionality government can achieve as a result of a two-party, defacto duopoli, where there is no real opposition, and the contentious issues are arbitrarily adopted by either side merely to achieve visibility to the voting public.
So while the government squanders time and resources for show, the real issues confronting the United States – presence in Asia, Syria, Europe – suffer.
Historically, this sort of breakdown in democratic process is the precursor to the fall of governments. Certainly the American public will not shed a tear of the reset button is hit on the current disaster.
