Government Shutdowns

Some things are fundamentally different now than during the first half of my life. Much of what I learned about the structure of our federal government seems no longer to be useful.

One thing that I knew was that Congress had the power of the purse-strings. While the Executive Branch could spend the revenue, it was Congress who passed the budget, and the President signed it. Checks and balances, fights over priorities, compromises. It was one of the major tasks of the government, to fund itself and consequently fund the services it provides to the country and its citizens, and they took it seriously and acted promptly.

I think we can thank Newt Gingrich for changing that. He is a point on a trajectory but I've learned to never underestimate the power of leaders to get large numbers of people to do evil things. He came to power as Speaker of the House by encouraging new legislators to speak of their opponents as traitors, distributing lists of phrases to use when speaking of the Democrats.  Since then there has been a thriving section of the Republican party that can not be seen to compromise publicly, and we have had serious government shutdowns ever since.

Democrats have their own evil history in their support of segregation pre-LBJ, but they've done enough to atone for that past that most folk don't go there, just their enemies. They have not thrived politically by saying that they would be happy to shut down the government if their demands aren't met; only Republicans seem to be doing that.

We have the recent (past decade) with Trump breaking the will of the leaders of the Republican party; now he is advocating that the government must shut down to impede the prosecution of the 91 crimes he has been indicted for. I don't know enough to be able to gauge how well that would work. It's a brave new world.

I do know with absolute certainty that the government is what stands between us and people who would endanger our lives if it increased their profits, whether it be what we eat, the medicines we take, the products we buy, the fuels we consume. When the rich and powerful wholeheartedly support shutting down the government they support weakening our defenses against such monsters, of whom Trump, the rapist and thief, is one of the loudest and neediest. God save our republic.