Weston Wamp
Contributed photoIf the government shuts down at the beginning of October, it will be unfortunate. Unfortunate because of the economic toll it will take and the missed opportunity by House Republicans it will represent. Of course, none of us should be surprised. A government shutdown would perfectly fit the personality of our chaotic 113th Congress.
Legislatively it may be the least productive congressional session in history. A government shutdown would give its members another opportunity to return home and jump onto their soapboxes.
I was eight years old when the government shut down the last time. My father was a first-term congressman when Newt Gingrich used continuing resolutions to take the federal government to the brink. As a little kid earnest to learn my first lessons about our democratic republic, I saw firsthand the unintended consequences of dogmatism. Since the American people are usually more willing to negotiate than their leaders, they tend to hold government shutdowns, and other massive failures of leadership, against the party that “takes its marbles and goes home,” especially when the the most powerful government in the history of the world is set to turn off the lights.
Gingrich seems to have learned this lesson, advising Speaker Boehner to match criticisms of Obamacare with Republican solutions. So have most Republican Senators who loath the House Republicans’ plan to try to defund Obamacare for what seems to be the millionth time. But this time it’s threatening to shut the government down in order to cut its purse strings.
My fellow University of Tennessee alumnus Sen. Bob Corker, said it well when he chided Ivy League educated freshman Sen. Ted Cruz, “I didn’t go to Harvard or Princeton, but I can count.” Cruz and others have tirelessly rallied grassroots conservatives around a controversial plan to defund Obamacare. As Corker reminds us, “This is a tactic that won’t work. When you have one third of government you don’t run the government.”