To Congress, Ending Shutdown Is Just Another Deal It Can Refuse

When a violent and potentially disastrous mob war breaks out in The Godfather, Corleone capo Clemenza is remarkably blasé about it all.

“These things gotta happen every five years or so, 10 years,” he explains matter-of-factly. “Helps to get rid of the bad blood.”

Not for the first time, I’ve been thinking back to gangster movies while watching Congress.

It’s typical to refer to government shutdowns like the one ongoing now as a “crisis.” But while both parties go to mattresses, repeated showdowns and deadline-driven governance have seemingly made Congress accustomed to what was once considered catastrophic.

This shutdown, in contrast to those of the recent past, has been marked by a distinct lack of urgency. It’s played out as a slow-rolling inevitability like a 10-car fender bender at 5 miles-per-hour in a parking lot.

Consider the Senate, which just took a four-day weekend heading into the third workweek of this shutdown. They voted Tuesday for the eighth time on a GOP funding plan that has been rejected repeatedly. Spoiler alert: it failed again.

That’s more than can be said for the House, which hasn’t voted since Sept. 19 and isn’t scheduled back this week, and so on Sunday will mark a full month without any meaningful floor activity.

Meanwhile President Donald Trump is focused on foreign affairs, including stopping the fighting in Gaza and pressing Russian President Vladimir Putin over his war in Ukraine. Aside from a single White House meeting and the inevitable social media posts, he has largely disengaged from the shutdown.

When the White House does speak up, it’s often to flex its muscles about laying off more federal workers. Trump announced plans to gut “Democrat programs” by Friday, glad to take an axe to government as long as there’s no spending law in place.

Both sides have signaled their comfort from the start. On Sept. 30, with the last funding law on the eve of expiring, the Senate held a last-ditch series of votes — around 6:40 pm. It failed, and if you voted quickly you still had time to get dinner at a reasonable hour before federal offices shuttered.

Party leaders are trying to present an illusion of activity, with daily Senate floor speeches or news conferences from the House’s Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), but they’re talking a lot to reporters and seemingly not at all to one another.

There’s some reason for it: for all the talk about the bad politics of shutdowns, recent history says the party that causes them suffers few long-term consequences.

The most acrimonious recent fight was fueled by Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) push to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2013. A year later the GOP made huge electoral gains in the House and Senate.

Once seen as guerrilla tactics, government shutdowns and debt ceiling increases are now regarded as leverage. The Senate minority can use those two issues to force the other side to the table, so the Capitol for years now has been driven by an unending cycle of deadlines met by setting new deadlines a few months later, and negotiations against the clock.

Usually the worst outcomes have been averted.

But as partisanship rises, and the Trump administration takes increasingly aggressive approaches to power without regard to Congress, the responses are rising in intensity as well. Attacks, rhetoric, and tactics that were once unthinkable are becoming commonplace. Just check any prominent political social media feed.

In this fight, the impacts are building but slowly. Some, such as missed pay for troops, have been avoided.

But there are also worse potential fights. Experts have long predicted that if Congress ever stumbles over the debt ceiling tripwire, and prevents the government from paying its existing obligations, the economic consequences would hit fast and hard.

This shutdown, though, shows that even those kinds of extreme results no longer scare Congress.