Today’s Staff Editorial
For 16 days during the government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal workers found themselves jobless. Military families faced uncertainty regarding paychecks and struggled to cope with the loss of child care and other services. Washington tourism slowed to a crawl as national monuments closed to the public. Estimates indicate the federal government hemorrhaged a staggering $24 billion. For 16 days, Congress failed democracy.
And it could happen again.
In what has become an all-too-familiar pattern, lawmakers came to the bargaining table disturbingly close to a midnight debt ceiling deadline, delaying further economic fallout but accomplishing little else.
Mere hours before the Treasury Department faced the inability to repay the nation’s debt, the Senate voted to reopen the government and raise the nation’s borrowing limit. President Obama signed the bill early Thursday, providing for funding through Jan. 15 and extending the $16.7 trillion debt ceiling until Feb. 7.
All told, the federal government ended up much in the same place it started. Funding stands at the sequestration levels, across-the-board cuts that took effect in March after the last round of fiscal negotiations. However, congressional Republicans had wrangled that concession from Democrats well before setting out to destroy the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Sixteen days after the government shut down, Obamacare emerged with a lone, minor alteration — tighter income verification standards for subsidy recipients in the newly formed insurance marketplaces. The law was virtually unscathed, Republicans’ ratings plummeted to historic lows, and the shutdown’s pointlessness proved abundantly clear.
This editorial board decried the shutdown from its inception; now, we urge lawmakers to put an end to this seemingly endless cycle of political brinkmanship.
Come January, Congress appears certain to repeat the debacle. The economy’s lost billions and the public backlash this time around may prove enough to dissuade lawmakers from shuttering the federal government two-and-a-half months from now, but Republicans and Democrats still seem unlikely to come to terms over the debt ceiling crisis.
Just 87 House Republicans voted in favor of ending the shutdown Wednesday. An astounding 144 voted against the bill. Though the bill passed by a 70-vote margin, it’s still staggering that after witnessing the shutdown’s devastating effects, so many lawmakers remained willing to hold citizens’ feet to the flames to further their political agendas.
After the relative anticlimax of sequestration earlier this year, the federal shutdown needs to demonstrate to Congress and the public alike the gravity of the current political climate. Widespread public apathy toward the shutdown — in fact, many viewed it as inevitable — speaks to the ubiquity of congressional unwillingness to compromise.
This isn’t what democracy was conceived to be: endless gridlock and perennial brushes with financial ruin. The day before the shutdown’s end, Fitch Ratings placed its opinion on the U.S. credit rating on Rating Watch Negative, citing the increasing risk of default. Though the debt ceiling was raised once more, it’s apparent that this recent cycle is far from sustainable — a fact many lawmakers have apparently overlooked since 2011, when the issue came to a head with the Budget Control Act.
The federal government is floundering — that, at least, can no longer be ignored. Though it’s difficult to fathom the nation defaulting on its credit, every partisan clash brings such a disaster closer to fruition. We know it sounds like a broken record, but lawmakers need to construct a lasting compromise. And soon.
