21 January 2018 (Paris, France) – This week’s U.S. government shutdown is a bipartisan failure, with bad faith all around, and both parties trying to blame the other for the consequences, in hopes of winning one for the team.
But it is also a systemic failure, in which an outdated budget process – the complex set of procedures that keeps the government open – has become an empty ritual, twisted in the service of narrow partisan gain. More on that in a moment.
And to blame Trump is silly. Stupid, even. As I look back at the U.S. from afar I see colleagues who regard Trump as an amazement beyond belief. That is to give him credit where none is due. He is undoubtedly a menace, but he isn’t a surprise. He is the product and mirror of an age distinguished by its extravagant displays of vanity and greed, so Trump’s positioning of government as a “trivial pursuit” is the way things are and have been in Washington and Wall Street for the last quarter of a century.
Nor is the spectacle of Edith Wharton’s frivolous society frivolously destroying itself exceptionally American. Study your history. France made a fine show of it in the late eighteenth century under the baton of Louis XVI; the Romanov and Hapsburg dynasties didn’t stint the production values for their early twentieth-century destructions of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.
The ancient Greeks would be proud, these spectacles serving proof of their hypothesis that forms of government follow one another in a sequence as certain as the changing of the seasons – tyranny overthrown by aristocracy, aristocracy replaced by democracy, democracy degenerating into mob rule, mob rule suppressed by a return to monarchy. All government, according to Aristotle, is the means by which a privileged few arrange the distribution of property and law to the less fortunate many; in every instance an oligarchy, its lifespan dependent on the quality of the men charged with the management of its economic, political, and moral enterprise.
As my French business partner remarked “oligarchies bear a biological resemblance to cheese. Sooner or later, they turn rancid in the sun”. Look, he’s French; in every analogy he makes it is either wine or cheese.
Perhaps, as Mike Allen (editor of Axios) said over the weekend “look, the United States of America has simply become ungovernable”.
Maybe the U.S. cannot fight the natural course of events. Wealth accumulates, men decay; a band of brothers that once aspired to forming a wise and just government acquires the character of what Aristotle likened to that of “the prosperous fool”, a class of men he described as ravenous in appetite for more – more banquets, more laurel wreaths and naval victories. Although Aristotle did leave out “… and more dancing girls” which seems to be Trump’s leitmotif.
Today in the U.S. it is just one unending political struggle for its own sake. The largest country in the world, with global responsibilities, is shutting down the government over a squabble that is 100% for short-term political gain.
- The post-World War II world that the U.S. has been living in for 7 decades was largely created – and certainly sustained and defended – by American power.
- Yet, since 2001, the U.S. has experienced almost nothing but reverses overseas, much of it truly major and permanent. And its relative power – the power to compel and protect – is shrinking as other countries rise.
- Domestically – oh, hell. It’s a shitstorm. The decision-making system has become locked in a destructive, inward-turned focus. The emphasis on an unending political struggle for its own sake.
- And … SURPRISE! … America’s enemies didn’t do this to them. All of it is virtually a product of U.S. decisions.
I do have a negative bias. I simply do not believe it is sustainable. America is well into a period of increasing internal chaos and decline overseas. In all of my discussions with all those “great and the good” folks I see when I am in the U.S., there is no recognition of this inevitable scenario. And nobody … nobody … with responsibility for making decisions for the country has any concrete, realistic plan to do anything about it. They are all focused on battling one another, not realizing they are drilling holes in the common boat heading for the falls.
I see constant chatter that the Republicans have been putting party above country ever since Newt Gingrich, that their party’s stated ideology is that big government is evil. That this destroys any attempt by those lawmakers (on both sides of the aisle) that have decided that their priority is to fulfill essential governing responsibilities.
I no longer live in the U.S. (being in Europe now for 13+ years) so I am not pulverised by the constant cable network drumbeat of “news” … so I might be missing something. But all of this is not equally the fault both parties. The Republicans control all the levers of government. They have refused to include the Democrats in fashioning any legislation. The Republicans meet in private closed door sessions and then hand legislative bills to Democrats with a “take it or leave it” approach.
Congress is broken, regardless of which party is in charge. The majority tries to ram through its agenda as quickly as possible before one of the houses changes hands in the next election. The minority has no power to force clean votes to be taken on issues like DACA (for my non-U.S. readers, that is the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” which is an immigration policy at the heart of Democrat/Republican disputes), or CHIP (another biggie, the “Children’s Health Insurance Program” which provides health coverage to eligible children, through both Medicaid and separate CHIP programs. CHIP is administered by states, according to federal requirements. The program is funded jointly by states and the federal government).
Thus, the only time power can be exercised is on spending bills, and they become all-out wars. And what happens? Budgets (which are not budgets) get riders for all manner of unconnected legislation.
As far as the budget “process”, I think Peter Suderman (he is managing editor at Reason.com) nails it. Over the weekend he noted on his blog:
- The budget? A systemic failure, in which an outdated budget process has become an empty ritual, twisted in the service of narrow partisan gain.
- The source of today’s dysfunctions goes back more than 40 years, to the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. That law was passed as a result of a perception within Congress – which under the Constitution holds the power of the purse – that the White House had too much influence over the budget.
- The law overhauled congressional budget development procedures in a manner intended to shift the balance of power in federal budgeting away from the executive and toward the legislature – and created the modern budget process.
- That process was kick-started by the drafting of an annual budget resolution that was initially intended to serve as a check on the president’s proposal.
- But in the 1990s, after decades of Congress being mostly controlled by Democrats, Republicans took power, and in the process upended the long-held assumption that Democrats would almost always be in charge.
- And fearing the possibility that Congress could change hands more often, they installed new incentives to use the budget process as a tool of partisan skirmishing that would make it easier to retain or regain control of the legislature. Instead of negotiating to achieve policy goals while maintaining a unified front against the executive, Congress was at war with itself.
And so the U.S. is where it is today: a budget process bogged down, with a government funded through temporary extensions known as continuing resolutions that fund government operations based on current levels. The reliance on an ad hoc system of budgeting has made it even more difficult for Congress to keep the nation’s fiscal house in order. Big surprise. Partisan volatility remains high, showdowns recur.