- Happy 2019, everyone.
We're all still here.
Donald Trump is on the verge of making some history.
Again!
And like most of the history Trump has made,
this isn't really the good kind of history.
The federal government, or at least a chunk of it,
has been shut down since December the 22nd.
Now, while you probably haven't been paying
that much attention to that fact, what with, you know,
the whole Christmas and New Years thing,
we are rapidly approaching the longest
government shutdown in modern history.
Repeat, the longest government shutdown in modern history.
The current record is 21 days, which happened
between December 16th, 1995, and January 6th, 1996.
The second longest was 18 days, way back in 1978.
And then, right there tied for second
and rapidly shooting up the charts is this here shutdown.
Before I get into why this shutdown
will almost certainly break all the records
that have come before it, it's probably worth explaining
how and why the government actually shuts down.
Alright, let's do this thing.
Congress is in charge of giving
the various departments and agencies
the money they need to operate every year.
It's right there in the Constitution.
They do this by passing 12 appropriations bills
by the end of the fiscal year, which is September the 30th.
Simple!
Right?
House and the Senate have an entire year
to pass 12 bills that keep the government up and running.
That's one bill a month.
That shouldn't be much of a problem.
We got this, guys.
Except that the two parties have increasingly used
this budgeting process and that September 30th deadline
as a negotiating tactic to get one
of the two chambers of Congress or the president
to give them something they want.
Take the '95-'96 shutdown, the current record holder.
The issue in that one was a major disagreement
between President Bill Clinton, a Democrat,
and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican,
over how much money should be given
to priorities like Medicare and public education.
Or the 2013 shutdown, that one wound up being
a vehicle for conservative Republicans,
led by Texas senator Ted Cruz, you may have heard of him,
to force a showdown over Obamacare.
Conservatives attached the repeal of the Affordable Care Act
to the legislation that was supposed to keep
the government up and running.
Which amounted to pouring bleach in the punch,
do not try that at home, and so the government,
yeah, you know the story, shut down.
This latest fight is similarly symbolic.
Much of the government is actually funded
via appropriations bills that have already
passed Congress and been signed by the president.
The shutdown is, therefore, only partial,
affecting about 25%-ish of the government.
That amounts to nine federal departments
and a variety of related agencies.
All told, it hits 800,000 federal workers,
about half of whom are working for no pay right about now.
Now, the main fight here is over funding
for the Department of Homeland Security.
President Trump wants $5 billion appropriated
for his much ballyhooed wall on the Mexico border.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says, no.
- We're not doing a wall.
Does anybody have any doubt about, we are not doing a wall.
This is not a wall between Mexico and the United States
that the president is creating here.
It's a wall between reality and his constituents.
- So, here we are.
The immovable force and the unstoppable object.
Or, more accurately, a game of chicken
with the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands
of federal workers in the balance.
This is, in a word, dumb.
It is in two words super dumb.
Even the most hard-line anti-immigration voices
don't see the construction of a wall along
the southern border as a major priority, they just don't.
And many Democrats have, in the past,
voted for miles of fencing along some portions of the border
between the United States and Mexico.
This is, folks, a political fight.
Trump thinks the wall promise
is one of the key reasons why he is president today.
At virtually every rally during the 2016 campaign,
Trump gloried in chants of build that wall from the crowds.
It's a symbol to him of the anti-political correctness
and speaking-truth-to-power-ness
that made people vote for him in the first place.
Sidebar, the idea of a wall
at the southern border is not terribly popular.
A CNN poll in December found that 57% of the US public
is against the wall, compared with just 38% who favor it.
Democrats, who have just retaken control of the House,
are emboldened by the results of the 2018 election,
and know that their base doesn't want
any sort of deal-making with Trump on any issue,
but most especially the issue of the wall,
which they see as the height of the president's hubris.
Wanna understand how far apart the two sides are?
Try this on for size.
After a meeting at the White House just after New Years,
Chuck Schumer, the top ranking Democrat in the Senate,
and Nancy Pelosi, the new House Speaker,
said the negotiations with Trump had been,
quote, contentious, end quote.
Just a few minutes later, the president
appeared in the Rose Garden
and cast the same meeting as, quote, productive.
What?
The two parties seem to be talking
entirely past one another, two ships
passing in the night.
Which is why I will go out on a limb
and say that this 2019 shutdown
is going into the record books as the longest one ever.
If I'm being honest, it's actually not that much of a limb.
Even if the White House and Democrats and Congress
were to agree today on a deal,
and again, that ain't happening,
it would take days to write a piece of legislation
detailing the agreement, and then pass it through Congress.
Logistics, people!
It always comes back to logistics.
Modern politics and politicians
do very little quickly or all that well,
and that includes keeping their own government open.
And that is the point.
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