Deadlock and Leadership
So, we have this - yet another manifestation of political deadlock in Washington.
So-called federal discretionary spending, which unlike mandatory spending, must be authorized every year, has been halted, because Congress cannot - or will not - pass another continuing resolution. In essence, "non-essential" government functions have been shut down, and nearly a million government employees have been sent home. In a classic example of performance art, Republicans in Congress say no more discretionary spending until Washington's latest entitlement program - the Affordable Care Act - is stopped or at least modified; Democrats, on the other hand, say the Act is already the law of the land (since 2010), and in any case has nothing to do with the procedural matter of passing another continuing resolution. President Obama, who has repeatedly stated that he will not negotiate over the matter of paying for spending already authorized, attempted to break the deadlock in a White House meeting last night with Congressional leaders. He failed, as he refused to negotiate.
Even worse can be expected in the next two weeks. The US public debt ceiling was once again reached last May, at $16.7 trillion, and after some shifting of spending by the Treasury between federal government departments over the past few months, Treasury Secretary Lew says it will be ultimately breached by October 17. If it isn't raised by Congress, default on some of the government's obligations - be they interest payments, or one or another of its entitlement programs - would be the result within a matter of weeks. Regular readers of this blog will recall that a similar display of Congressional incompetence in late 2011 (resolved at the last moment by the "Sequester" agreement) led to the first-ever S&P credit downgrade of US government debt. So, although the current shutdown is annoying and disrupting, the impending battle over raising the debt ceiling is, indeed, serious.
Political deadlock is, of course, nothing new in Washington. But in earlier instances, it revolved around rather more significant issues than continuing resolutions or even debt ceilings. And, invariably, it was broken by Presidential leadership. Thus, for example, in 1862, President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves, in a political environment characterized by not just a contentious Congress, but by an entire country split in two. Similarly, President Johnson, who under tragic circumstances inherited not just the presidency but also political deadlock from the Kennedy administration, nonetheless managed to use his office, almost miraculously, to finally achieve the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act - in an extremely hostile Congress.
If today's impasse is not to persist, such leadership is needed again. The difficulty is that the current crop of Washington leaders - President Obama, Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Reid - are showing no signs of leading.