(We occasionally will present and contrast view points that differ in insight. From time to time we will feature them here. Please read the articles below)
(Article 1: The Hill)
Panetta: Lessons from shutdowns are never learned
Former Clinton White House chief of staff and budget director Leon Panetta, who was in the thick of a 1995 government shutdown, wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post Saturday that lessons are never learned when the government closes.
“[L]eaders of both parties have recognized that shutdowns are a bad way to do the country’s business. And yet, time and time again, the lessons from those shutdowns are never learned. Today, parts of the federal government again are shut down during the Christmas season, and the same mistakes are being made — particularly by the president and the Republican majority in Congress,” he wrote.
Former President Clinton and emboldened Republicans in Congress, led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) disagreed on greater savings and cuts from Medicare, resulting in a Christmas shutdown in 1995. The public overwhelmingly blamed Republicans, costing the party several congressional seats and handing Clinton a second term in the 1996 election.
Panetta listed several lessons that should have been learned from that shutdown.
He argued that “harming people never works,” referencing the hundreds of thousands of federal employees who have been furloughed or forced to work without pay. Read more
(Article 2 National Review)
When Tip Did It
Tip O’Neill presided over two-thirds of the government shutdowns since 1976.
The government shut down on October 1 for the 18th time since 1976, after the House and Senate could not agree on a resolution to fund it. Democrats have accused Republicans of negotiating with “a bomb strapped to their chest” and putting “a gun to everybody’s head,” as if it were an anomalous development in the modern political era for Congress to seek to extract policy concessions from the White House by withholding spending authorization. The resulting shutdown, Democrats now suggest, is as unprecedented as it is deplorable. Or, in the words of one esteemed liberal, it is “the end result of a 50-year GOP push to make govt = welfare and welfare = black people.”
Historically speaking, it is rather remarkable that Washington hasn’t experienced a government shutdown in nearly two decades. The shutdowns of the mid 1990s have been the subject of much debate. Beyond that, however, the chattering class appears to suffer from a short memory, as it often does.
At this point in Ronald Reagan’s second term, for example, the government had already shut down six times, for a total of twelve days, as a result of failed budget negotiations between the White House, a Republican Senate, and House Democrats under the leadership of Speaker Tip O’Neill (D., Mass.) — precisely the opposite of the political dynamic that exists today. Former O’Neill staffer and MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews has written an entire book extolling that era as a time “when politics worked.” (You can probably guess how he feels about the current situation.)
#ad#O’Neill presided over a total of seven government shutdowns under Reagan, and five during the Jimmy Carter administration, meaning that he played a role in precisely two-thirds of all the government shutdowns since the modern budgeting process has been in place. Representative Raul Labrador (R., Idaho) pointed this out to Matthews on Meet the Press on Sunday, noting that O’Neill was never called a terrorist for shutting the government down over budget negotiations. Matthews didn’t care for the reminder and even questioned the source of Labrador’s claim; it was the Washington Post.
Interestingly, nearly all of the shutdowns that took place during the Carter administration, when Democrats also controlled the Senate under Senate majority leader Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.), were the result of disagreements over abortion policy, and lasted more than ten days on average. In several instances between 1977 and 1979, the Democratic House resisted the Democratic Senate’s efforts to expand the number of cases for which federal funds, via Medicaid, could be used to pay for abortion. The government partially shut down three times for a total of 28 days between September and December 1977 as lawmakers negotiated a compromise on the issue, although it would be revisited several times during subsequent shutdowns. Read more
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