By State Representative, Leon D. Young
Leon D. Young
The high-stakes game of political chicken has apparently reached its flashpoint. As many as 800,000 federal employees now face furloughs, because the House and Senate failed to break a bitter budget standoff over President Obama’s health care law.
Like truculent children, House Tea Party members have been trying to extort a deal whereby they would agree to essential federal funding in return for Democrats voting to defund Obamacare. In the absence of deal being struck, a federal shutdown has begun.
This isn’t the first time a Democratic president has endured a government shutdown due to an intransigent Republican House Majority.
The previous time was during the 104th Congress (1995-96), which gave Newt Gingrich the Speaker’s gavel.
But there’s an important difference between this shutdown and the last: In the last shutdown, Republicans could genuinely assert that the public was on their side.
It may seem like ancient history now, but the Republican landslide of 1994 ended a Democratic House majority that had lasted for 40 years. The last Republican Speakership had ended in 1955.
President Clinton had only been elected in 1992 with 43 percent vote (due to Perot’s third party bid attracting 19 percent).
Gingrich and his fellow House members had run on their “Contract with America.” They had won decisively.
They spent the next two years fighting tooth-and-nail to enact that agenda.
The 1995/96 government shutdown was evidence that Gingrich and company had overplayed their hand.
But, looking back, we can at least reasonably understand why they could think they had so much support.
This is clearly not the case this time around, when one considers these facts.
Barack Obama was reelected in 2012 and the Affordable Health Care Act was a central issue in that election.
Moreover, Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate. Democrats even received more votes in the House, but partisan gerrymandering ensured an enduring Republican House majority.
The Republicans lost the last election while campaigning on the repeal of Obamacare.
Now they’ve decided to shut the entire government down unless Obamacare is hamstrung, regardless.
The art of politics is all about compromise. The Tea Party, on the other hand, has a far different agenda.
For them, politics is about advancing its radical ideology – come hell or high water – with little to no thought given to governing the nation. This strikes me as being completely insane and reckless.