Deadlock and a failure to compromise permeated through the U.S. Congress and into Tuesday morning as the Republican-dominated House pushing its agenda to defund the Affordable Care Act and the Democrat-dominated Senate acting in support of President Barack Obama’s directives missed their midnight deadline and forced the federal government into its first shutdown in 17 years.
The shutdown, which will put approximately 800,000 federal workers on temporary leave, appeared imminent after neither house of Congress seemed ready to compromise on passing a federal budget to start the new fiscal year by Oct. 1. As the deadline for a new budget approached, House Republicans chose to pursue a defunding of the ACA, something they have repeatedly tried to do since the law was passed, in what David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called a “last ditch effort.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., acting in conjunction with Obama’s directives, refused to accept the defunding provision and set up what turned out to be a cycle of refusals from both Congressional houses where Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, and the House would attach the provision only to have the Senate strip the House's provision soon after receiving it. The cycle ran throughout Monday and eventually spilled past the midnight deadline.
The fallout and inability to pass a budgetary consensus will now have widespread implications throughout the nation, with government workers from national park employees to food inspectors being put on furlough, according to Canon. He added the shutdown will have the greatest effect in Washington D.C. where an estimate puts the total daily economic loss at $200 million and that the shutdown will greatly hamper federal legal proceedings until Congress can negotiate a deal.
However, Congress and Obama pushed a provision through late Monday that would maintain pay for U.S. troops during the shutdown.
Republicans in support of defunding the ACA said they were acting with the support of the public. Canon said the majority of polls show the opposite with a large gulf between those supporting a shutdown and those opposing it.
U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., released a statement early Tuesday morning condemning Republicans for what he said was “a sad day for the American people.”
“Instead of working together to fulfill our most basic duty—to keep the government running—the extreme Tea Party wing has taken Congress hostage all the way to a government shutdown,” Pocan said in the statement.
U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Wis., said in a statement the shutdown “is not a moment to be proud of or to celebrate” and that the plan to defund the ACA was an “irrational” decision.
“I hope congressional leadership in both chambers and both parties will work expeditiously to resolve this issue and bring this shutdown to a close,” Ribble said in the statement.
Boehner will also have to focus on the pending debt ceiling decision this month. If the government were unable to reach a decision on the debt ceiling, it would stand to default on its federal loans for the first time in history.
Democrats were hoping to tackle the issues separately, Canon said, but given Monday night’s stalemate, the two major fiscal decisions could now coincide with each other.
The negotiation process to resolve the shutdown will now play out between Congress and Obama in the coming days.
