Only Presidents, Not Congress, Have Shut Down the Government

     Government shutdowns occur when government no longer has any legal authority to spend. When United States President George H.W. Bush vetoed the deficit-spending bills of the liberal Democratic-controlled Congress, Democrats and their allies in the liberal media blamed him for the brief government shutdown that ensued.

     But when Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, vetoed the spending reductions of the Republican-controlled Congress, the Democrats and the liberal media blamed the Congress instead of the President. Their only consistency was in blaming the Republicans for shutting down the government as a result of the fiscal dispute. 

     Constitutionally, in disputes between the Executive and Legislative Branches of the federal government, only a president can shut down the government because only he has the power to veto spending bills or an increase in the debt ceiling approved by Congress.

     The only way Congress could ever be responsible for a government shut-down is if it were to fail to pass a bill authorizing spending, which would be unprecedented. Such a contingency would only be possible in two ways: either the House fails to approve a fiscal bill to prevent the shutdown or the Senate disagrees with the House bill.

     After the Republicans won the majority in Congress in the 1994 elections, they proposed spending reductions in order to balance the budget. At the time, Clinton had raised taxes, dramatically cut the military and intelligence budget and yet increased the deficit (which, as I have noted previously, liberals in politics and the media referred to as his “deficit reduction plan”). Clinton projected $200 billion deficits indefinitely and was non-committal on how long it would take to balance the budget. In the meantime, he was well on his way to adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal debt, an increase that was not undone by the later temporary annual budget surpluses that have obscured his earlier spendthrift ways.

     The Republicans in Congress adopted the strategy of passing spending cuts in order to present Clinton with the choice of vetoing the bill or shutting down the government, just as the Democrats had done with their deficit-spending proposals under his predecessor. The GOP strategy was not to shut down the government, but to force Clinton into the spending reductions. The liberal Democrats falsely portrayed the Republican strategy as intending to shut down the government. To liberal Democrats, government is the greatest force for good in the world and shutting it down, even temporarily in order to reduce the deficit, is a catastrophe. They employed the usual scare tactics that government spenders do by focusing on the most sensational aspects of the government shutdown while portraying the Republicans as “mean” for not wanting to spend more than the government took in while passing off the bill to future generations. For a time, the liberal scare tactics seemed to be working.

     Then, despite the way it is still portrayed in the liberal media, public opinion began to turn against Clinton and the liberal Democrats as the American people began to regard the shutdown as the result of a lack of presidential leadership. In other words, they were increasingly recognizing Clinton’s veto as the cause of the government shutdown. The Republicans blinked first and compromised, although it was far short of their goals. Later, however, they built on their momentum and succeeded in forcing significant domestic spending cuts while increasing spending for the military and lowering some taxes. The reduction in the capital gains tax was particularly stimulative of the economic growth of the late 1990s that was the main cause of the later budget surpluses, not Clinton’s earlier tax increase which had slowed growth. 

     I raise the point that it is only the President or the Senate who can trigger a government shutdown in the current fiscal dispute. There is a possibility of a veto by President Barak Obama of any spending cuts approved by the Republican House of Representatives and agreed to by the Democratic Senate. This time, however, there could be a congressional failure to act if the Senate does not agree to the House’s spending cuts before there were any possibility of a presidential veto. Then, it would be the Senate’s fault for shutting down the government.

     The consistent point is that regardless of the political party or motivation, only the President or the Senate can by their actions legally trigger the federal government to shut down for a lack of spending authority, as long as the representatives of the people do act.

     At this time, the House wants to act, but is trying to approve a bill it knows the Senate and President would accept. If a compromise cannot be reached soon, the House will likely approve the spending cuts it wants and force the Senate or President to choose between reducing the deficit or shutting down the government. Conservatives must explain that the blame would lie with the liberal Democrats in the White House or Senate for failing to pass a fiscal bill, regardless of whether one agrees with the proposed Republican spending cuts or not. But given the fiscal crisis, conservatives ought to promote the cuts as the only fiscally, economically and morally responsible action.