IT WAS NEITHER A TRUMP SHUTDOWN NOR A SCHUMER SHUTDOWN

…These are the two Government Shutdown Culprits

 

To date, the Senate and House agendas have not included a single serious budget deal.

 

It was a Ryan/McConnell shutdown.

 

Both McConnell and Ryan, after all, lead the majority party in both houses and they also control the legislative agenda. They are the ones that determine which bills will come up for a vote and when they will vote. They knew well in advance the deadlines for keeping the government funded.

 

In addition, they both knew the Democrats’ conditions to get their cooperation, especially in the Senate where they needed some Democratic votes to make-up their required 60 votes. 

 

But what did these two Republicans do?  Both McConnell and Ryan chose to do nothing.  In fact, it was worse than nothing. Once again proving that the GOP has no idea about governing, both Republican leaders pissed away precious time and political capital on policy pursuits that were totally irrelevant to governing. And as I said, worse than irrelevant, they were totally destructive. 

 

Think about it! Every year, the US Congress is supposed to pass a budget. This was not a surprise.  But the last time the US Congress passed an annual budget was the budget for US Fiscal Year 2010.  For the first half of last year, the Republican congressional leaders chose to spend their time and energy chasing a repeal of Obamacare.  Not only was that a failure, it was a majorly unpopular action that would have raised premiums and ripped health insurance away from tens of millions of Americans. 

 

They not only failed with Obamacare, they also missed any opportunity to pass a budget before the new fiscal year begins in October.

 

So  what do these two so called leaders do?  They kicked that can down the road, passing a stop-gap funding measure and promising to deal with a real budget later, you know, before early December. 

 

But do they do what they promised before December??  Oh no.  They instead of even attempting a to pass a budget, they instead pivot to another unrelated, unpopular and fiscally unsound action: tax cuts for corporations and the rich. 

 

This time they were successful. But while they had screwed around with the Obamacare repeal and $1.5 trillion in tax-cuts-for-the-rich, more time-sensitive crisis arose.

 

Those included the hurricanes that devastated Puerto Rico, which were natural crisis, but others were man-made.  Such as the authorization for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that had lapsed, leaving 9 million low-income kids in total limbo.

 

Then with both McConnell and Ryan’s blessing, President Trump announced that undocumented immigrants brought here as children would be subject to deportation come March, unless the US Congress acted.  But that didn’t matter because the only thing McConnell and Ryan felt any urgency to work on was the things their donors cared about. They focused on those issues while orchestrating another stop-gap budgetary measures in their spare time. 

 

This latest Continuing Resolution (CR) represents the fourth stop-gap resolution funding bill, and this one is set to expire on Feb. 8.  Fortunately, it does include a six-year reauthorization of CHIP. 

 

On top of the poor performance of these two “leaders”, the president has been no help in getting anywhere on the budget, or health care and immigration or any other major policy issues. When he gets involved, he just shows how ignorant he is about any details of what’s being decided or even how the legislative process actually works. 

 

But for McConnell and Ryan, they have no such excuse. Combined, these two have served five decades in Congress. They know all Congress’s bizarre procedures and, as I said, they set their agendas. To date, those agendas have not included a single serious budget deal.

 

But these two take no responsibility for the lack of an annual budget. They’re like high school students who fritter away their assignments until the last moment, then they plead for extensions, but they still wait until the last minute to start working on the issue, then a shiny object takes their attention away from that goal.

 

As embarrassing as this latest shutdown was, shutdowns are not totally catastrophic. What is more worrisome is these two’s lack of real leadership with yet another showdown rapidly approaching. And unfortunately, the budget isn’t the only basic responsibility they’ve been shirking. There’s also the matter of safeguarding the validity of the public debt, a constitutional requirement. 

 

I have always asked, why do we even have a statutory debt limit?  Congress has relied on a series of on-going stopgap measures for paying our creditors over the past year. The Treasury Department has had to resort to “extraordinary” accounting measures to stave off a debt default, and should this occur, it could trigger a worldwide financial crisis.  The debt limit is a totally bogus issue that should not even exist.

 

The latest round of these stop-gap measures began in early December, and will likely be exhausted sometime in the next several weeks. Meanwhile, the markets look nervous about what the Congress is going to do.  Having a nervous stock market is not good.

 

Yet instead of laying the groundwork now to prevent default, both McConnell and Ryan engage in their hashtag wars. They’re now cutting more taxes and Ryan is even fantasizing about slashing entitlements. 

 

As one WAPO writer wrote:  “#McConnellRyanShutdown is bad enough. Let’s hope #McConnellRyanCrash isn’t coming next”

 

Copyright G.Ater  2018