For those who don’t know, the government shut down Tuesday. You may not have noticed since it does seem to happen a lot these days – but this time it’s for real. According to The New York Times, some 800,000 people will be cast out of work. One of them is my father. Others are the parents of some of my friends. Some of them are probably your relatives too.
It’d be easy to blame this on the Republican Party’s obstructionist stance toward Obamacare, and you know what? You’d be absolutely right to do so. If you want to be specific in your condemnation, though, you need look no further than that merry bunch of grandstanding scoundrels in the House of Representatives.
It’s understandable if you’ve stopped paying attention to them; the only things they’ve passed recently have been 42 different symbolic repeals of Obamacare. The House Republicans have likened current health care reforms to tyranny and Nazism, which is a comparison that really speaks for itself.
So when it came time to keep the government running, they demanded yet again that Obamacare be either defunded or delayed before they’d pass a budget. The Senate, by now reasonably sick of this, said it wasn’t going to pass something now that it hadn’t passed 42 times before and to please just vote on the damn budget. The House Republicans refused. And all “non-essential” lights went out.
Congress is considered essential, by the way, so the same people who shut down the government are some of the few people still getting paid by it. There are few professions where you can refuse to do your job and still be financially rewarded. Truly, America is a land of opportunity.
The House Republicans are blaming the Democrats for not compromising, which is pretty rich, considering that Democrats will compromise at the drop of a hat if you let them. In fact, over the past few years the Democratic party has done nothing but compromise, to the point where it’s negatively affected the bills that they wanted to pass. The House Republicans have hardly budged at all, which suggests that their definition of the word compromise is “giving us everything that we want.”
A basic tenant of negotiation is that both parties have to want to solve something, and both parties have to be willing to give something up, or to accommodate the wishes of others. But House Republicans aren’t interested in solving anything. They aren’t interested in giving up anything. They certainly aren’t interested in accommodations. To them, compromise is something Democrats do in order to please Republicans. It’s a sign of weakness. It’s leverage for getting exactly what you want, the rest of the country be damned.
To paraphrase President Obama, one faction in one party occupying one house in one branch of government should not be able to hold the country hostage. They should not be responsible for risking our families’ livelihood in hopes of scoring political points. They should not be paid for breaking the system. Such a situation is insane.
But here we are. Settle in, everybody. Happy shutdown.
Asher Elbein is a senior in New College. His column runs biweekly.
