The federal government shut down last night after a sharply divided Congress failed to pass a stopgap funding measure.
For Texans, that means uncertainty; from delayed services to potential impacts on communities already facing challenges.
Karen Tumulty, chief political correspondent for the Washington Post, says Republicans and Democrats have so far been unwilling to compromise. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: The president met on Monday with Democratic congressional leaders, but no agreement was reached to prevent the government shutdown. Did the parties engage in any last-minute negotiations yesterday?
Karen Tumulty: Not at all. So the government did, in fact, shut down at midnight. I can say it did not affect traffic in my commute into the office this morning. So everything right now looks and feels very normal.
But, you know that that’s not going to last for long. And one thing that is different: these shutdowns happen pretty often here in Washington because Congress doesn’t get all of its spending bills passed by the end of the fiscal year, so they have to come up with a patch. They happen pretty often.
But President Trump is threatening to do something this time around that has not been done before, which is that instead of furloughing government employees – and then when they come back, they get back pay – he’s saying he’s just going to go ahead and start firing people. And that, he believes, is going to give him some leverage against Democrats who are holding out for a handful of conditions to get their votes.
So I’m assuming that is going to be affecting certain sectors that maybe wouldn’t be necessarily impacted by the shutdown, like national security operations, for instance.
The shutdowns are only what what are deemed “nonessential employees.” But yeah, it is a question of, again, whether these employees who are temporarily furloughed – and for that matter, employees in other agencies – are just going to lose their jobs permanently.
What the president said yesterday was, we can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible, like cutting vast numbers of people out and cutting things that they like, he said about the Democrats.
And Democrats say they’re unwilling to agree on the stopgap funding plan until Republicans give back health care cuts that they pushed through in March. So what were those cuts and why is this the issue where Democrats have decided to make their stamp?
Well, there are a couple of sets of cuts involving health care. One which has gotten a lot of attention all year is cutbacks on Medicaid.
But there is also a set for people who are covered under the Affordable Care Act. There is a set of government subsidies that have made that coverage much more inexpensive for them. And those government subsidies would expire.
So a whole bunch of people who buy their health coverage through the Affordable Care Act are going to get a very big, big increase in their cost. And one thing that is interesting about that is that these affordable care subsidies coming to an end would affect red states more than blue states and especially states like Texas that haven’t expanded their Medicaid programs under the ACA.
And I know folks on both sides of the aisle – Republicans, Democrats – accuse each other of causing the shutdown. Do you have a sense as to which party has the stronger political argument to make, especially if this is going to be turning out to be a longer shutdown?
Yeah, I’ve lived through a few of those, and it really ends up coming down to which side has a clearer message and a better discipline at maintaining that message.
And I go all the way back to the very famous shutdown after Republicans took over Congress in 1994. There was a shutdown at the end of 1995 that extended into 1996. And the Democrats who at that point controlled the White House were able to drive the message that all Republicans were doing was trying to cut Medicaid so that they could give tax cuts to the rich.
I mean, the Republicans said they were trying to reform the program. But at one point, as this shutdown drags on and on, they sort of lost control of the narrative and it hurt them.
But the other thing that’s really important to know about these shutdowns is that generally in the past, even ones that have gone on for a while, they have an immediate effect on sort of the political standing of each party, but usually by election time, they are long forgotten.
