To explore the government shutdown, The Current spoke with Charles Zelden, professor of history in the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences’ Division of Humanities, who specializes in constitutional and election law. He explained what a shutdown means, the roots of the political fight over the budget and its effects on the U.S. economy and Americans.
On defining a government shutdown
To call it a shutdown is both accurate and inaccurate. It’s accurate in the sense that it really is shutting down the government, but it’s inaccurate in the fact that it’s only shutting down the nonessential parts of the government.
There are about 1.6 million employees of the federal government, who are still working, including members of the military, and those deemed essential to the workings of their offices, but over 800,000 federal employees have been shut down. Nonessential services have been shut down, including the national parks, national monuments, the Smithsonian and things like the Environmental Protection Agency, or the Center for Disease Control, or the people who check to see that the food that we are eating is being slaughtered and canned according to the rules.
All that’s been shut down, because we just don’t have money to pay for it — not that we don’t have the money; we haven’t simply budgeted for it. And the law says that until we have a budget, we can’t just go on willy-nilly.
On why it shut down
So what usually has been happening is we passed what’s called a continuing resolution, which all it is, is an agreement we will continue to abide by our current budget. So what we have budgeted for your division or this department or that segment of the government will simply continue for another six, eight, 10 weeks until we can come up with a new budget for the year.
Unfortunately, the Republicans who control the House of Representatives are basically saying we won’t vote in a continuing resolution until we get certain policy reconsiderations taken care of, most significant of which is they want to either end or delay or in some manner hinder the expansion of the Affordable Care Act.
And the Democrats’ response and the president’s response is no. We will not allow that.
The problem is that, if you’re a conservative Republican, if you’re a true believing conservative Republican, you don’t want government to spend money; you want government to be as small as possible, as cheap as possible, as nonexistent as possible. And so the idea of government shutting down and not providing these services doesn’t bother you because it’s providing services you don’t care about. And the idea of raising the debt limit sounds horrible to you because you’re raising debt. And the whole idea is you don’t want to see the government acquiring debt, forgetting the fact that we have already agreed to this in the first place.
And so there’s a core within the Republican Party in the House that absolutely does not want to see any of this happen: doesn’t want to see the Affordable Care Act go into effect, doesn’t want to see us acquiring more debt, wants to see us shrink the federal government. And basically knowing that they are right, 100 percent absolutely correct, they’re willing to do this — whatever the consequences — because, in the end, this is what’s good for America.
They’re a minority; they only make up about 10 to 15 percent of the House of Representatives. The problem is the rest of the Republican Party are cowed by them because, for one thing, they are themselves conservative; they don’t like the idea of an expanding federal government. But, for another, they’re absolutely terrified of the thought that they would get primaried by someone to their right and that they would lose their seat in the primary.
On the debt limit
Adding to the dilemma is what we call the debt limit. The debt limit is simply permission to the Treasury to continue to pay off on the debts we’ve already acquired. In other words, congress has already said yes, you can spend the money. But now we have to service the debt; we have to pay the interest. We’ve got to acquire more debt in order to continue spending priorities that have been set.
It’s like having credit line at a bank. You’ve got $100,000 of credit. You can spend it. When you hit $100,000, either you need more credit or you stop.
If you default on your obligations, that’s called going bankrupt; your creditors get angry, they sue you. If a government does this, all of a sudden, they can’t pay for the services they’re providing.
Worse yet, if you were to default on your obligations, your credit rating would go down; your number would go from 700 to 300. And all of a sudden, you can’t get a loan, you can’t get a mortgage or your credit card now is like 30 percent interest. If we default on a loan, on our obligations, the whole world economy either grinds to a halt or has to find a new benchmark place in which to base all credit worthiness and that will hurt the United States.
[Defaulting] hurts our reputation. It will hurt our economy. It will make it harder to get jobs. It will make it harder to build our economy. It will make it harder for us to do the things that we feel we need to do.
On the effects of the shutdown
If you need a new passport right now, it isn’t going to happen. If you are here on the G.I. Bill, for the time being, the money is flowing, but if this lasts long enough, that money will dry up. If you need services that are provided for by the state, but that are funded through matching federal funds, those services may be held back or even ended temporarily because the state simply doesn’t have the money for it and the federal funds aren’t there.
Federal funding for research here on campus: shut down. If your grandparents receive Social Security, the funding for that is set, but if it goes long enough, the checks will come later and later, because the people who are in charge of printing the checks and sending the checks are working with a smaller staff size.
But the scary thing is there’s nobody watching to make sure that the meat we eat is safe, that the drugs we take are properly cleared.
All efforts to keep out illegal immigrants from the work force have stopped.
While, the military is still operating, the civilian support groups that keep the military operating properly have shut down. And, in many cases, the military is operating right now on IOUs: “We’ll pay you when the money comes,” which is really a fine thing to do until you have to say this to the guy you buy food from.
No new small business loans, no insurance for people who want to build strip malls or condos, because that’s federally funded.
You can’t get flood insurance if you don’t have it right now. And, of course, living in South Florida, given the weather today, is a reminder we have the potential for flooding here at any time.
While, the National Hurricane Center is still doing its job keeping the eye on the hurricanes, research into how to better predict where the hurricanes are going to hit and when they’re going to hit and how strong they’re going to be is completely shut down.
On the ideological fight
The long and short of this is that we’re fighting over the nature of the American government. What is the job? What is the purpose of government? And the Republicans, the conservatives, have a very negative view of government. They want a government that does very, very little.
The Democrats have a more activist view of government. Government should at the very least assure that everyone has an opportunity to get insurance and that it’s affordable for those who can’t afford to pay for it, that there should be a social safety net that helps the poor and the elderly and those in need.
And this is just part of an ongoing fight over this.
When I lecture about the Constitution, I explain that there were three things that resulted in the Constitution in its final form. And they were compromise, compromise and compromise and really hard, painful compromises.
The system is designed that you have to give something up to get something. It’s designed and accepts the fact that if we all get less than we fully want, no one is happy, but we’ve probably resulted in the public good.
