After 35 days, the longest shutdown in our nation’s history ended with a fizzle, a cave, and a win. While some of us who spent our winter breaks binging and creating a permanent butt-print in the couch, our government, outside of a few funded departments, screeched to a halt over a border wall.
Yet, looking back at those 35 days, it is important to remember exactly what the shutdown cost us, and where we can point the blame. Billions of dollars in gross domestic product can never be recovered. When 800,000 government workers quit going out on lunchbreaks, local economies felt the crunch. The damage done to our national parks was tremendous, as trashcans and toilets spill over in one of the nastiest things to happen in our parks. This is why they are supposed to close in a shutdown, so there are not piles of poop in the parks. Rents were due, and many had to find industrious ways out of a situation that could have been prevented had the government been cooperating. Highlights included Wilber Ross suggesting paycheck to paycheck workers were abusing foodbanks, and a shared podium moment between Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer where Schumer looked like the father who can only get a “your mother is right, you know” edge-wise.
Pelosi took a stand on behalf of the millions of Americans who chose her, and her party to lead the House of Representatives, with growing public support for her resistance. So, unlike most issues in politics that devolve into a “let us agree to disagree, it is both sides” argument, this one falls squarely on the shoulders of President Donald Trump. He chose, in a curious televised meeting, to accept blame for the shutdown. Now, as leader of our country, his decision to own one of the most obnoxious perennial events in our political history came off for him and his party as a brave stand against illegal immigration. He had too much to lose from failing to funding for the wall.
Yet he underestimated a reinforced Democratic party and a speaker with the strength to stand against him. Efforts to undermine Pelosi became embarrassments, and the polls turned against him. In opposition to an argument that 90% of undocumented immigrants overstay visas, not illegally cross borders and drugs overwhelmingly come through ports of entry, Trump realized that his situation was as stopped up as a national park toilet. As our government slowly rolls toward either another shutdown or a national emergency, everyone should be reminded of the damage this did, not only to the lives that were affected for a month but the whole country, and ask them to remember whose intransigence put us here.
Photo from Pixabay
