Stop treating shutdowns like normal politics

Politicians treat it like a game, but ordinary people pay the price.

Every time the U.S. approaches a government shutdown, the media turns it into a spectacle. Who stormed out of which meeting? Did Schumer and Jeffries show up at the White House? Which party is “winning” the standoff?

I’ve been getting a lot of messages asking why I’m not breathlessly covering the shutdown fight in that same way. The reason is simple: the shutdown ritual is an atrocity, not a sporting event.

For most of American history, shutdowns didn’t exist. If Congress was late passing a budget, the government kept running. That changed in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department reinterpreted a the Anti-Deficiency Act, a law from the 1800s, in a way that weaponized the budget process. Suddenly, politicians could use shutdown threats as leverage instead of being embarrassed by their own inability to govern.

The result is a manufactured crisis that punishes ordinary people. Federal workers go weeks without pay. Veterans wait on benefits. Small businesses lose contracts. Families miss Social Security checks. Travelers face delays as TSA and air traffic controllers work without pay. Meanwhile, the same politicians who created this mess keep collecting their salaries.

And when the shutdown ends? Nothing gets solved. Agencies are backlogged. Confidence in government sinks further. The entire cycle leaves the country weaker.

The shutdown never solves a problem. It creates problems.

Yes, it’s usually Republicans who drive these shutdowns. But the larger point is that the mechanism itself is broken. Treating every standoff like a political rivalry misses the fact that shutdowns are a uniquely American dysfunction. Other democracies argue about budgets and policy without holding their citizens hostage every year or two.

That’s why I refuse to cover shutdowns the way CNN, Fox, and MSNBC do. This is not a story about who “wins” the showdown. It’s a story about a system that has normalized sabotage.

On yesterday’s show, I spoke with Senator Chris Murphy who has been striking the right note on this. But we won’t be rehashing negotiation tactics. The real question is: why do we tolerate this absurd ritual at all?

We should be demanding an end to this contrived crisis. Until then, I won’t pretend it’s anything other than what it is: a failure of governance that harms the very people government is supposed to serve.

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—David

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