If you live in America and you find politics boring and pointless, you're probably watching anything other than the news right now. I on the other hand have never found politics to be as intriguing as I do since moving here! So let me see if I can sum up this latest furore...
Congress basically has one key duty laid out in the
US Constitution: pass spending bills (proposed laws) that fund the government. If it doesn't, most of the functions of the government slowly grind to a halt. Today is the final day of the US government's fiscal year, and congress has been unable to agree on a federal budget to take us into the next fiscal year. The result: a so-called
government shutdown at midnight tonight in which non-essential government agencies are shut down, such as national parks, federal courts, welfare agencies and so forth. Even the
Statue of Liberty here in New York, the emblem of freedom and democracy around the world, will be closed to the public (that'll piss a lot of tourists off). Hundreds of thousands of federal employees deemed non-essential will be placed on furlough until further notice. More essential government agencies will continue to operate however such as the military, air traffic control, federal prisons etc. A shutdown could last only a few hours, or it could last several days.
So what's the holdup? In a nutshell, the right-wing conservative
Republican Party (one of the two major contemporary US political parties, the other being the left-wing liberal
Democratic Party, currently in power after
Obama won a second term as President
last year) want the current spending bill to be stripped of funding for an overhaul of the US health care system that was put forward by the Obama administration, officially called the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act but colloquially known as "Obamacare". Obamacare is a signature achievement of the Obama administration (and the first such overhaul of the US health system in decades), and they're refusing to budge on its implementation. The United States Congress consists of two houses, or departments: the
House of Representatives whose 435 members represent each US state in proportion to its population (e.g. California currently has 53 representatives in the House), and the
Senate with two representatives per state regardless of population. The House and the Senate each have distinct roles and responsibilities but each must pass federal legislation bills, first the House and then the Senate, before they can be signed into law by the President (or alternatively, rejected by the President and passed back to the Senate for reconsideration). All members of congress are directly elected through public voting, and currently the House has a Republican majority, i.e. the majority of its members are Republicans. On the other hand, the Senate currently has a Democratic majority. The current spending bill has been going back and forth between the House and the Senate, with the Democratic-led Senate rejecting each of the Republican-led House's alternative versions of the bill because of the House's persistent proposal to strip Obamacare from the bill, at least partially. There is a means to resolve such disagreements by way of the
congressional conference committee - a temporary, ad-hoc panel composed of House and Senate conferees for the purpose of resolving disagreements on a particular bill. House Republican members have blocked this spending bill from "going to committee" however by not appointing conferees to talk it out with conferees from the Senate, due to fears it could further hamper their party's interests. Regardless, until they all get their act together and come to an agreement, the government will remain shut down. Elsewhere in the world, such shutdowns are practically impossible. In the United States however, government shutdowns - or the threat thereof - have become an accepted negotiating tactic thanks to the quirks of the American federal system which allows different branches of government to be controlled by different parties. It was a structure devised by the nation's founders way back when to encourage compromise and deliberation, but lately has had just the opposite effect.
Obamacare was signed into law more than three years ago now, was given the green light by the
US Supreme Court in terms of its constitutionality, and was a central issue during the presidential election last year which Obama comfortably won. On the face of it all, it really does seem like sour grapes on the part of Republicans and a pathetic attempt to address it by holding the country hostage. Such is the nature of a democracy. However, despite Obama's victory last year, public opinion of Obamacare is generally negative, but the majority of people admit to having a minimal understanding its full impact. Even I had to thoroughly research to understand it. Ultimately, the goal of the health care reform is to give more Americans access to affordable, quality health insurance and to reduce the growth in health care spending in the US. While I don't want to go into detail about it all here, Obamacare does have some very beneficial changes but also has a lot of shortcomings (which the Obama administration has pledged to address).
So does a government shutdown affect the average Joe Blogs? Probably not directly, unless you're a federal employee deemed non-essential, a beneficiary of a government-funded welfare program, in need of a federal loan to buy a house, want a gun permit, etc. Indirectly though, we may all be impacted to a certain degree depending on the length of a shutdown. The fragile US economy for example will likely take a hit, and the stock markets already are despite recent record highs. As for me, well I'm not exactly sure yet whether this could delay my pending application for permanent residency in the US. With just a few hours left before midnight, it's highly unlikely this is going to be resolved in time. Believe it or not though, the United States Federal Government has shut down on 17 occasions since 1976, but not since the end of 1995 (18 years ago). On that occasion it lasted 21 days.
On a different but related subject, another huge congressional showdown
is right around the corner over the country's so-called
debt ceiling or debt limit. Remember that time when you maxed out your credit card? That's what the debt limit is all about. The US is on the verge of maxing out its $16.699 trillion credit card, and the president must ask Congress to raise the country's credit limit. But that's a whole other story for later in the month, and my guess is the Republicans will attempt a similar ploy of holding the country to ransom to get its way. Having said that, the seemingly out-of-control government spending and therefore government debt is exactly what the Republicans are all hot under the collar about, and is part of the reason they want to strip Obamacare as part of a larger objective to rein in government spending. Like I said, intriguing, if not a little pathetic at times. In fact the American people are pretty sick of this sort of shit from their government; they've seen a lot of it lately.