Easy to Start a War; Hard to End one 

In the WSJ, Oklahoma senator James Lankford, the vice chair of the Republican Conference, discusses with Kimberley Strassel in “All Things Considered” the government shutdown. With no deal in sight, with both parties dug in, where does America go from here?

A meeting between Donald Trump and Congress’s top leaders, including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, did not yield any grand bargain. Nobody much thought it would.

Before wading into the politics of this, suggests Ms. Strassel, let’s examine the mechanics by going back to what happened in 2018:

What does stay open, what’s shutting, what are you hearing about the administration’s plans for how this is going to roll?

The Trump administration has been unusually quiet about what its plans are.

The federal government runs on a fiscal year from October the 1st to September the 30th.

There are 12 appropriation bills that must be passed by Congress, signed by the president, to fund what’s called the discretionary side of the budget. The two sides of the budget: 1.)  discretionary side, and 2.) mandatory side. Included in the mandatory side: Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare; things not affected at all by a government shutdown.

On the discretionary side is about $1.5 trillion for national defense, education, transportation, basic operation of the courts, federal law enforcement, etc.

If the budget work isn’t done by September the 30th, both sides are “not funded.” A government shutdown means some workers are essential and must stay there even though they’re not getting paid. Other workers are considered non-essential. They go home and wait until the shutdown is over, explains Lankford. When all is said and done, however, all these workers will be paid once the dust settles.

… every single administration handles it a little bit differently.

• President Obama shut down all the national parks when there was a shutdown in his presidency.
• Donald Trump, when the shutdown in his, made it the easiest he possibly could, kept everything open, declared as many places essential as he could.

… it is unknown what the (Trump) administration will do this time other than saying, “Hey, I may fire some folks that they’re declared non-essential.” If they’re non-essential in a shutdown, maybe they’re non-essential for all time.

This shutdown is unique in several ways. Have Democrats factored in an unusual aspect, which does make it different? The Trump administration most likely does not want a shutdown. It would rather, by example, pass bipartisan permitting reform through Congress.

If a shutdown is foisted on it, Congress will look for an opportunity.

From the Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought,

Folks, I want all you to submit these plans to me, identifying employees in your department who, if we go into shutdown, will not maybe just be furloughed, but who will be let go permanently as part of reductions and force cuts in departments.” that sounds to me like the administration maybe is going to use that to try to zero out some of these agencies that they’d like to see closed in any event. Is that something that Democrats have factored into this do you expect to see happen? 

Now, both parties are arguing about seven weeks of staying open. Democrats also want a trillion dollars in spending and changes in healthcare aspects, the unwinding of One Big Beautiful Bill.

Oddly, yet fairly routinely, Democrats are looking for ways to resist Trump even if it seems irrational.

Treading back to the Obama shutdown: Obama shut the national parks, something that an administration can do. Obama’s intention clearly was to punish the American people as a way of really making Republicans own the shutdown. This administration, to the extent that it does have some control over how a shutdown rolls, instead is trying to make this as minimally inconvenient as possible for Americans and maximally inconvenient to the Democrats who caused it.

The Dynamics 

Shutdowns are hard. There are many variables. Neither party knows what it is heading into, due to those variables and the many different agencies. What happens is a wild card.

Then there are other challenges:  once you’re closed down, how do you reopen? What is it in the negotiation? The Democrats could say, “Well, we finally won this, and so we reopened.”

The House of Representatives passed a Clean Continuing Resolution just keeping us open for seven weeks, then they left. The only option that’s sitting there is just stay open for seven weeks, continue the negotiations on appropriation bills, be able to get those done.

What are Democrats looking for? Dems want for the House to come back and to be able to negotiate something else, but they have been all over the place on this.

So the challenge is they don’t know what happens once you get into a shutdown, and you also don’t know what it takes to reopen it. It’s the old adage: it’s easy to start a war, it’s hard to stop one. It’s kind of at that moment when you deal with the shutdown time. 

Watching Which Network? 

Who gets blamed for the shutdown? Conventional wisdom holds that the party in power gets blamed for a shutdown. Some polls out there are showing that the party in power gets blamed. Some polls show significant numbers of Americans – the ones who don’t really know who to blame – are blaming everybody.

That would suggest that there’s an opening here for persuasive messaging. Who has the better messaging? Who’s going to win that war?

Is Congress Able to Do the Job

Congress is functioning under the “1974 Budget Act.” Lankford jokes, “We don’t wear ties from 1974, we don’t wear shoes from 1974, but we’re still functioning under the 1974 Budget Act, which has not worked in decades and decades.” It worked for about two decades after it was passed, and not since.

What Congress Still Hasn’t Done 

There’s a need for budget reform: We’ve not passed all 12 appropriation bills. We’re not running on time.

Sen. Lankford talks about being on the calendar year, not a fiscal year.

When we do get it done, it gets done in December every year. Why don’t we acknowledge gravity and just say, “Let’s actually run on a calendar year”? Why don’t we do every two years for a lot of these budget cycles? Let’s combine some of these different pieces rather than doing 12. I mean, there’s some simple straightforward things to do, but one of the things I’ve really pushed on for several years is we need to prevent government shutdowns, and there’s a … straightforward way to be able to do it.

Lankford partnered with a bill with Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire, to try to make this nonpartisan. It basically says you get to the end of the fiscal year:

Whether that’s September 30 or December 31, doesn’t matter where it is, you get to the end of that.

If one of your 12 appropriation bills is not done, or all of the 12 are not done, like they are this time, you have an automatic continuing resolution that kicks in to keep the government open at status-quo level.

But members of Congress are in session seven days a week. We lose all of our travel allowances to be able to do anything.

Trapped in DC over a Weekend

If you really want to get a member of Congress’s attention, challenges Lankford, make them stay in DC over a weekend, or make them stay through one of the recess weeks. That way, “you’ll have undivided attention.” Many members are billionaires, which is fine, but everybody’s like, “If you take away their pay,” Lankford notes, “There are several members here. Their pay is a rounding error to their investment portfolio. That’s not a big deal on that.”

Time is the big deal to everybody. It’s the great equalizer. You remove everyone’s time, you have everyone’s attention to say, “Okay, let’s actually focus on this and get this done.”

Plus, you can’t move to other important bills until this set is done. That just puts us in the box. If I can say it like my mom would say, when my brother and I were fighting in the living room, she would say, “The two of you, go to your room. You fight this out. Stop disturbing the rest of the family. You guys settle it, then you can come back here.”

Basically, it holds the American people and federal workers harmless while Congress fights over the serious issues of what we’re going to do on budgeting.

There are fights to be had, but quite frankly, we look terrible in the world stage when we have government shutdowns. The rest of the world can’t figure out why the US can’t get (its) act together on … we often have these continuing resolutions forever, forever, forever, and things don’t get done. 

Finding a Path

How, asks Sen. Lankford, to solve this?

The last time we brought this up for a vote was in 2023. We got 56 votes for this, bipartisan. We got 56 votes for this, just shy of the 60 that’s needed. So, I continue to be able to build the coalition on it and to say, “Let’s actually work to be able to get this done.”

(If) there’s a better way to do it. … it received the highest number of votes of any of the government-shutdown proposals that have been out there in decades, because I think people are looking at it going, “That’s a better way to be able to do this.” It’s not trying to create some gimmick. It’s just saying, “Stay after class until you get your work done.”

The Lock Congress in a Box Act 

Kimberley Strassel is enthusiastic about renaming the bill. She asks Sen. Lackford about building a coalition to reach 60-plus votes, so that when Republicans have the vote, it will actually pass.

Quite frankly, boasts Leckford, when we had to vote in 2023, every Republican appropriator voted for my bill.”

… multiple of the Democrat appropriators did as well.

(People) see it as hostile to government shutdowns. It doesn’t solve all the problems, but it does solve one. We can never have a shutdown again.