Why Mitch McConnell is right about federal government shutdowns

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., doesn’t like where things seem to be heading in Washington as the deadline to fund the government beyond next week looms. “I’m not a fan of government shutdowns. I’ve seen a few of them over the years,” he told reporters Tuesday. “They never have produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans politically.”

McConnell should know — it was only a few years before he entered the Senate in 1984 that shutting down the federal government was even seen as a possibility, let alone a semi-frequent occurrence. Since then, we’ve had five major shutdowns, with Republicans instigating the majority of them. But with House conservatives seemingly determined to follow that same path once again — and with McConnell’s habit of shading the truth about legislative precedents — it’s worth a quick a look at the accuracy of his sentiments.

Government shutdowns go back only to 1980, when President Jimmy Carter’s attorney general provided an opinion determining that “during periods of ‘lapsed appropriations,’ no funds may be expended except as necessary to bring about the orderly termination of an agency’s functions.” In the years immediately after, there were a handful of limited shutdowns, all either extremely brief or limited in terms of how many federal workers were affected.

That all changed with the Republican Revolution of 1994, when Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., led Republicans to their first House majority in decades. By the fall of 1995, Speaker Gingrich was on a clear collision course with President Bill Clinton over spending. In short, Gingrich and the GOP had promised massive spending cuts and tax breaks, while Clinton wanted to expand funding for things like education and public health. A first short-term spending bill expired without a deal, prompting a brief shutdown, before another continuing resolution was passed. That one expired, as well, in December 1995 after Clinton vetoed a GOP budget plan, leading the federal government to close up shop for 21 days.

Setting the tone for future shutdowns, Clinton had the upper hand in polls, especially after an unforced error when Gingrich appeared to blame the shutdown on Clinton’s snubbing him on a flight. The House wound up agreeing to Clinton’s budget demands. To this day, Gingrich argues that the shutdown didn’t hurt Republicans, since they kept their House majority in 1996 even as Clinton cruised to re-election. But it definitely didn’t help.

It was 17 years before the memory of that shutdown had faded enough for a new generation of Republicans — swept into control of the House in the 2010 midterms — to convince themselves that a new shutdown was a great idea. With the support of senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, House Republicans tried to use a short-term funding bill to block the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. That effort was a complete failure, as the GOP eventually just wound up passing a spending bill without any changes to Obama’s health care law. Once again, Democrats and Obama were seen as the responsible adults in the room during the 16-day shutdown. And, ironically, the shutdown also managed to keep the spotlight off of actual problems with the rollout of the Obamacare website.

The January 2018 shutdown was unusual on multiple levels. For one, it occurred when Republicans had complete control of Congress and the White House. President Donald Trump had announced in September 2017 that he was ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or DACA, threatening thousands of so-called Dreamers with potential deportation. Senate Democrats opted to filibuster a continuing resolution to force a vote on a bill to codify DACA.

Even though this particular shutdown was an outlier, McConnell’s thesis holds up here: The three-day shutdown didn’t result in the DACA extension Democrats sought. The government quickly reopened based on McConnell’s promise to eventually hold a vote on a set of immigration bills. (In typical Senate fashion, all of the bills were filibustered.) But importantly, in a number of polls, the GOP-controlled Congress, Trump or both were still blamed by at least a plurality or a majority of Americans for causing the shutdown.

The most recent shutdown, which began in December 2018, became the longest in history. Democrats had won control of the House in that year’s midterms, but the GOP was still in the driver’s seat and had passed funding for at least some parts of the government. Trump then announced that he wouldn’t sign any further continuing resolutions that didn’t include a massive increase in funding for his border wall. The eventual partial shutdown dragged into the new year and a new Congress, with Democrats officially becoming the majority.

In that case, voters blamed Trump. That’s not surprising, since he had said on camera at a meeting with congressional Democratic leaders, “I am proud to shut down the government for border security,” adding, “I will be the one to shut it down,” in case there was any ambiguity. (Naturally, he then proceeded to blame the Democrats for wanting to shut down the government.) He also flip-flopped over whether he’d accept a bill that didn’t fund the border wall, hammering home that, yes, he was the roadblock here.

In the end, Trump agreed to reopen the government after 35 days, with no new funding for the wall included in the short-term funding bill that landed on his desk. He eventually signed another funding bill that included the same amount of funding for border fencing that he’d been offered back in December.

Taken together, this is more than enough proof that McConnell is right: Shutdowns have never been winning moves. Yet here we are again, just days away from a shutdown with no clear plan to prevent one from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. I do think that the members of the House chaos caucus who are convinced that government shutdowns are no big deal believe what they’re saying. But they’re basing their belief on a metric — what would help them look good to the right-wing media and voters — that might help them individually but wouldn’t help actually achieve their professed goals, as fractured and disparate as they are.