While the nation’s capital appeared to be heading toward another crippling government shutdown this weekend, America didn’t exactly appear to be on the edge of its collective seat.
At least judging by Google search trends, in the days leading up to the shutdown that wasn’t, Americans were more curious about who shot Tupac Shakur, who might win “The Golden Bachelor,” and who would win the massive Powerball jackpot. Even National Coffee Day 2023 temporarily triggered more searches than the possible government shutdown.
These are probably not signs that the public is convinced that the country’s leaders would somehow avoid falling off the cliff at the last minute, even if surprisingly that was the case. Instead, they could point out that America at this point assumes that Washington will actually fall over the cliff, because that’s what Washington is doing these days. Finally, the eleventh-hour congressional agreement that kept the government open only lasts until mid-November.
America, it seems, has now expected a crisis. At a time of unrest, polarization and insurrection, when a former president is convicted of 91 crimes in four criminal trials, a sitting president faces an impeachment inquiry and a speaker of the House of Representatives faces a possible move to remove him The country is getting used to the chaos in the capital. Dysfunction is the new normal.
“Unfortunately, for the average American outside the Beltway, these government shutdowns are nothing new,” said G. William Hoagland, who spent 33 years in the federal government, most of them as the Senate Republicans’ chief budget official.
Government shutdowns are a modern phenomenon and a measure of how restless the capital has become. While Congress has occasionally failed to pass spending legislation in a timely manner in the past, this did not result in widespread shutdowns until President Jimmy Carter’s attorney general decided in 1980 and 1981 that without congressional appropriations, non-essential functions would have to be shut down. This happened several times under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, but often only for a few hours or days or over a weekend where it was hardly noticed.
The seismic shift came in late 1995 and early 1996, when House Republicans launched successive shutdowns during a budget dispute with President Bill Clinton, sparking a popular backlash that made such tactics politically radioactive for nearly 18 years. Since 2013, however, Presidents Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump and Biden have all likely faced the threat of multi-day closures, making them almost routine.
“That’s a big part of the problem,” said former Sen. Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri. “Dysfunction and chaos are now in the political bloodstream, and that’s why people aren’t calling or emailing DC” to raise objections with their representatives. “They see this as part of normal, polarized, partisan politics in Washington.”
What made this upcoming shutdown different from previous ones was that it was less a fight between Democrats and Republicans and more a fight between Republicans and Republicans. Speaker Kevin McCarthy lost control of his narrow majority and was pressured into a shutdown by a handful of hardliners who opposed him, forcing him to turn to Democrats to prevent it.
In the days leading up to the midnight Saturday deadline, Mr. Biden’s White House sought to stoke public opposition to what it called an “extreme Republican shutdown” by issuing a series of statements outlining the consequences Highlighted: cutting food aid to impoverished parents, hampering efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking, delaying disaster recovery and cutting paychecks for troops.
But as immersed as Washington was in the political game, there was no major popular uprising or even major complaints from Wall Street elites, who typically worry that a government shutdown could hurt the economy. The financial markets shrugged off this. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the week down 1.3 percent on Friday, while the S&P 500 lost about half that.
According to political veterans, the only way that could change is if a shutdown lasts for an extended period of time, food aid to millions of low-income mothers and children is suspended, national parks are closed, air travel is delayed and more than three million people are forced into crisis Civilian and military employees must leave without pay. “It will take a longer shutdown when people really start to feel pain to see the political blowback for Republican House members who are playing this irresponsible game,” Ms. McCaskill said.
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, said that “a small minority” of his party had no problem “ravaging the institution” and would continue to do so unless there was a political price to pay.
“Financial markets and most Americans have become numb to the drama; However, swing voters tend to punish these unnecessary spectacles,” he said.
A Monmouth University poll found that voters, by a margin of 2 to 1, preferred their representatives to compromise rather than stick to principles if it would lead to a shutdown. But even though this weekend’s showdown was engineered by a small cadre of right-wing Republicans in the House of Representatives, polls made it unclear who would be blamed.
Another YouGov poll last week found that 29 percent of Americans blamed House Republicans for the standoff, compared with 14 percent who blamed House Democrats and 13 percent who named Mr. Biden – with In other words, the distribution was almost evenly split between both parties. Almost a third believed everyone was equally to blame.
“If you ask the American public if they want compromise, they say yes,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth poll. “But when you ask them who they are going to vote for,” he continued, they stand by their party and believe that it is the other side that will not compromise.
David McLennan, a political science professor at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and director of the university’s survey, said the cascade of once-rare outbursts in Washington — shutdowns, impeachment, criminal proceedings, internal revolt — has expanded into a broader sense of dissatisfaction with the direction of the country has trickled down to the state level. He calls it a “contagion effect.”
“There is no demographic where the majority of people believe things are going well in the country,” he said. “Partisans, Democrats, Republicans and independent voters all think things are going badly.”
Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said the public is so used to disorder in Washington that it has lowered the bar for what it will accept.
“Our expectations have fallen and we have become dangerously numb to our government’s failures,” she said. “It is becoming increasingly difficult to see how we can change this and assert our role in the world. The only way to change this is to make demands on our leaders that are driven not by more outrage but by a desire for greater unity in the country.”
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