Government Shutdowns as Parliamentary Terrorism
This weekend, America embarks on its modern political tradition; the government shutdown. That semi-annual event spurred on by the inability, or lack of desire, to make sure that the necessary and constitutional duty of the American Congress, that being the appropriation of funds to all federal activities, is fulfilled in time before the previous appropriations run out.
This weekend’s shutdown will be America’s 11th. Precipitated by the inability for the Republican caucus in the House to negotiate a plan that their slim majority can all get behind, this shutdown hasn’t even reached the usual partisan conflict which has historically created such situations. Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, is attempting to land a plane on a runway that doesn’t exist and with a hijacker threatening to off him if he dares land the plane at the open and available commercial runway directly ahead.
McCarthy’s mess is of his own doing, so don’t feel too bad for him. In order to win his seat as the 55th speaker of the House, he had to cut a few backroom deals with the most openly rambunctious and wily members of his caucus. While the exact details of that deal haven't been made public, it has been widely reported that he lessened the rules around a Speaker recall, meaning it only takes a single person out of the House’s 435 members to start the process in replacing him as Speaker.
In cutting that deal McCarthy essentially signed a Faustian bargain on his speakership, he got the post, but his ability to keep it for any meaningful stretch of time was sure to be tested. Perhaps McCarthy should have heeded the words of his party’s president at the time when he was first elected to the House. In 2002, George W. Bush emphatically stated during a trip to Israel that “no nation can negotiate with terrorists.” This was obviously uttered at the outset of the American/Global ‘War on Terror’ which would ultimately end in failure in Afghanistan, quagmire in Iraq, and the spawning of countless terrorism sympathetic forces and organizations around the Middle East. But those terrorists were easy to avoid negotiation with, they came from a different culture, practiced a "foreign" religion, and were hard to sympathize with for most Americans.
McCarthy’s terrorists don’t appear as coming from a different culture, he can’t identify them by their clothes, and they all vocally praise the same individual in Donald Trump (even if they disparage him in private). That’s because McCarthy’s terrorists are coming from inside the house. Like naughty children, McCarthy’s terrorists at least sit on the right side of the aisle and claim to speak for good, strong, conservative values. But because his terrorists are supposed to be on the same team, McCarthy seems unable or unwilling to view his job as anything other than an extension of supporting his political team, the Republican Party.
Historically the speaker of the House is considered one of the most important pieces of American government. The holder sits second-in-line, after the Vice President, of presidential succession. The speaker is both the political head of their congressional party and the acting official of half of the lawmaking branch of the government. The office is both clearly a political one, they are appointed almost universally by the party in the majority, but also a position of stewardship for the American government.
Much as the presidency is a position which is both political and ceremonial, the speaker too must be willing to put partisan divides aside for the good of running the entire House. McCarthy has clearly taken his lessons from Donald Trump. President Trump was the first person in that office to decide to eschew his role as president of all Americans and instead operate purely from a partisan position. He used the office to benefit himself and by extension, if they were lucky, his own party at every opportunity. He didn’t even seem to understand why a president would act differently. Far removed from the model that every president at least pretended to ascribe to.
So too has McCarthy found himself doing whatever he can to keep his party together and himself as speaker, even if that means trying to force the approval of bills which his Senate colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats, will never agree to. But even that doesn’t seem to be enough. The terrorists in McCarthy’s caucus won’t even agree to the plans he’s come up with, even as those plans would never pass the Senate anyway. That’s because these rambunctious members of the House have no desire to see a working government. They work on the nihilism that the American government is already so far “woke” or so bloated and unwieldy that to shut it down is not a problem, it’s a solution. These are elected officials who explicitly don’t see their job as acting in the best interests of American governance but rather in their own ideological aims to reshape America to their non-existent version of a non-existent past.
What better way to term these members of the House than terrorists? These are members of the House who are wielding the power that they have to inflict maximum damage on the institution in which they took an oath to uphold. I have no doubt that this crew, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz believe that they truly are hewing to a set of values and beliefs and that those beliefs are worth using every means possible in order to achieve. But so too does every terrorist. Terrorism is never carried out as just another act of random violence. To be terrorism an act must have a political aim. It is a form of political speech in its most terrible extreme.
While the act of parliamentary terrorism cannot be easily compared to real world political violence, one must still grapple with the practical effects that a government shutdown has on the American economy and by extension, the American people. In the 2018-2019 government shutdown, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the shutdown cost the American economy $3 billion while the five week shutdown cost the government itself $5 billion. Not to mention the nearly half-a-million federal workers who were furloughed without pay during the dispute. This is real damage to the American economy and the American government. How can we refer to the wanton employment of this mechanism in a political fight as anything other than terrorism?
Speaker McCarthy has clear recourse in this fight. He could take the path of the Senate and bring a bipartisan bill to the floor. This would avert a shutdown and allow for better negotiation before the next appropriations fight comes up just later this year. But because he’s already engaged in extensive negotiations with his caucus terrorists he is being held hostage from doing the job he is supposed to do as Speaker. When McCarthy was finally elected as speaker on the 15th ballot in January, many political observers worried his speakership would be historically short and weak. While a shutdown may prolong his time in the job, it will almost certainly cast him for what he is, the weakest and least capable speaker of the House in American history.
