In the early hours of Saturday morning, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill that would fund the government and cut sixty billion dollars from its budget. While its passage represents the conclusion of a full week of debate during which hundreds of amendments related to spending cuts were considered, it also represents Washington’s tendency to place symbolism over practicality and partisanship over the wellbeing of the American people.
This budget battle also comes at a crucial time. If some sort of spending bill is not approved by March 3, then the government will shut down. That means federal employees will not report to work, government payroll will not be met, national parks will be closed, and subsidies will not be sent.
Both sides agree that a government shutdown would be disastrous. The weeklong government shutdown in 1995 cost the government almost a billion dollars and directly affected millions of Americans. This threat raises the need for a spending bill’s passage.
Given that the Democratic Party controls the Senate and the Republicans control the House, a compromise in which both houses, and thus both parties, agree will be necessary for the funding bill to become law. Unfortunately, the bill that passed through the House did so without a single Democratic vote, and it is expected to fail along partisan lines in the Senate. Both parties are to blame for this failure.
Republicans, emboldened by their bolstered numbers from the recent election, have taken to cutting too deep to hope for Democrat agreement. Several Republicans on the Appropriations Committee, which drafted the original bill, even said that it would be unrealistic to expect the current bill to be passed in the Senate. They initially suggested a bill that cut half as much.
Additionally, their cuts also brought more touchy issues into the budget debate. They inserted several legislative blocks that prohibit President Obama from implementing his policies and made certain cuts for the sake of advancing an alternate agenda. For example, they voted to completely defund Planned Parenthood, which then makes a vote on the budget a vote on abortion funding.
For their part, Democrats have turned this battle into a blame game and given little ground in the budget battle themselves. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that a government shutdown would be a “failure” on the part of Republicans. Obama has claimed that the House bill would endanger national security and threatened to veto a bill that had deep cuts. Both House and Senate Democrats have offered up budgets that would continue spending at the 2010 levels, freezing, rather than cutting, current spending levels. By taking this action, Democrats are drawing a hard line in the sand.
The result of this budget battle is a game of chicken between Republicans and Democrats. Each side is more concerned with public approval than actually funding the government. As a result, instead of working together to find an acceptable bill, they are trying to alter the perceptions of the American public by claiming that the shutdown would be the fault of the other party. They are using the battle to advance alternate goals, such as prohibiting certain parts of Obama’s healthcare reform from being implemented.
If neither side blinks, then the government will shut down. If an elderly couple does not get their social security checks because of it, I seriously doubt that they really care whether the bill defunds the Marine’s sponsorship of NASCAR or not. In fact, if they knew that the bill failed and they didn’t receive their checks because of small partisan-filled debates like this, they probably would be outraged.
It is disgraceful that both parties would shutdown the government if it meant gaining the political upper hand against the other party. It is one thing to hold a rally and energize a crowd for or against a particular issue. It is another thing to dramatically and tangibly harm the lives of millions of Americans in order to win an intangible political battle.
The bill that should have passed through the house would have had bipartisan support. Republicans should have been willing to hold back on advancing alternate agendas and cutting too deep and Democrats should have been willing to cut more than they want. After all, compromise is the essence of our government and the bill that passed from the House Saturday morning was severely lacking in it.
John Brinkerhoff is a freshman majoring in political science and communication studies. His column runs biweekly on Mondays.
