There is something rotten at the core of American democracy, and the fault lines are increasingly being exposed now that one of the two major political parties has gone completely off the rails and proven incapable of governing. You’ve probably heard the term “American exceptionalism”—it’s a belief, often espoused by the right, that the United States is morally superior and holds a special place in the world as a role model for other nations in constructing their own democratic societies.
But do other democracies view the United States as a role model these days? Absolutely not. That’s because other democracies do not have to deal with recurring problems such as raising the debt ceiling or averting government shutdowns which threaten a global financial meltdown. And there’s no other country where a single senator can put a hold on hundreds of military promotions as Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville has done due to archaic Senate rules.
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After Congress reached a last-minute deal this past weekend to avoid a shutdown by passing a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running until Nov. 17, the BBC published an article headlined: “Why government shutdowns seem to happen only in US.” It began as follows:
The US government has shutdown ten times over the past 40-plus years. Meanwhile, in other countries, governments keep functioning, even in the midst of wars and constitutional crises. So why does this uniquely American phenomenon keep happening?
For most of the world, a government shutdown is very bad news—the result of revolution, invasion or disaster. That leaders of one of the most powerful nations on Earth willingly provoked a crisis that suspends public services and decreases economic growth is surprising to many. [...]
So why does this keep happening?
America's federal system of government allows different branches of government to be controlled by different parties. It was a structure devised by the nation's founders to encourage compromise and deliberation, but lately has had the opposite effect.
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Authoritarian governments mock the U.S. for its inability to avoid government shutdowns. Five years ago, during a three-day shutdown in January 2018 due to a dispute between President Donald Trump and Senate Democrats over immigration policy, China’s official news agency Xinhua blamed “chronic flaws” in U.S. politics for the budget impasse.
“The Western democratic system is hailed by the developed world as near perfect and the most superior political system to run a country. … However, what’s happening in the United States today will make more people worldwide reflect on the viability and legitimacy of such a chaotic political system,” Xinhua wrote.
But China’s dismissal of Western democracy is wrong. Such shutdowns are pretty much uniquely American. Government shutdowns are practically impossible in other democratic nations because most European democracies as well as Canada and Australia have a parliamentary system, as the BBC notes. That means that the executive and legislature are controlled by the same party or governing coalition, and the prime minister submits his budget for the parliament to approve.
And on the rare occasions when a parliament refuses to pass a budget proposed by the prime minister such an action would be seen as a vote of no confidence in the government. That would likely trigger a snap election, but not shut down government services. That is a strong motivator for legislators in the ruling party to approve a budget.
In a 2018 story about why governments in other countries don’t have shutdowns, Rick Noack of The Washington Post wrote:
Elsewhere in the world, constitutions or political systems prevent scenarios that would be comparable to the U.S. impasse, even though parliaments have a say on budgets there, too. The difference, however, is that most countries have installed specific mechanisms to escape a U.S.-style deadlock so that citizens don’t pay for partisan disagreements.
In some countries, government budgets are even more associated with the fate of those in power themselves than in the United States — which, perhaps unexpectedly, often ends up helping to reach consensus or results in a more permanent solution.
In Australia, for instance, budgets have to be passed or else the government is usually forced to resign or Parliament gets dissolved. What’s different in Australia and other countries is the threshold of lawmakers needed to confirm spending, though: an absolute majority, with over 50 percent of all members of Parliament, is sufficient. Hence, a failure to pass the budget usually only occurs when a government has lost the support of its own party or of the parties backing it. The inability to pass a budget also does not lead to an immediate funding stop but rather to a mere delay in planned investments, amounting to up to 25 percent of the annual budget.
But in the U.S., a budget must be approved by the gerrymandered House where Republican lawmakers consider compromise a dirty word, then get passed by the Senate with a filibuster-proof 60 votes, and be signed into law by the president who has veto power. And unlike their counterparts abroad, U.S. presidents can’t be forced from office due to budget impasses.
And there’s another problem—midterm elections, which are unique to the U.S. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all entered office with Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, only to lose control of at least one chamber in the midterms. That resulted in government shutdowns in the second half of Obama’s and Clinton’s terms, and Biden faces the threat of a shutdown in November.
The BBC and Washington Post offered several examples of how other countries dealt with budget crises without shutting down the government:
CANADA: In 2011, opposition parties turned down the budget proposed by then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, which lacked a majority of seats in parliament. The House of Commons passed a motion of no-confidence, resulting in an election, yet government services continued.
BELGIUM: The country didn’t have an elected government in place for 589 days between 2010-2011 due to tensions between its Flemish and French-speaking parties, but a caretaker coalition presided over the country and money still flowed to keep the government running.
IRELAND: Ireland had a minority government from 2016-2020 but avoided a government shutdown. The parties not in power agreed to support spending bills and confidence votes.
BRAZIL: The South American country is not a parliamentary democracy. Like the U.S., Brazil has separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches. In 2008, the Congress rejected President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s spending plans. But even though there was no budget, there was no reduction in government services.
GERMANY: In 2004, the government faced resistance to its budget bill for the first time in contemporary history. A blockade of the spending bill by the upper house of the parliament was defeated in a vote by the government-dominated lower house. Even if the upper house’s decision had not been overturned, German employment law makes it impossible for government workers to be furloughed because of political disagreements.
The Washington Post wrote:
When European coalition talks fail or drag on for months … the most recent budget usually continues to apply and is administered by the previous government that is in place until a new leadership takes over.
Hence, civil servants continue to be paid and government-funded construction projects are not halted.
And then there is the growing polarization in the country that Trump has encouraged. Other countries don’t have a bunch of political nihilists like the MAGA cultists in the House Freedom Caucus who have no interest in compromise or cooperation. The BBC wrote:
Warring political parties seem all-too willing to use the day-to-day functioning of the government as a bargaining chip to extract demands from the other side. The latest shutdown, for example, is the result of a minority of hard-line conservative Republican members of Congress demanding deep spending cuts that centrists in their own party and Democrats would not support.
American exceptionalism, indeed.
So how did we get into this mess?
What’s interesting is that for nearly 200 years, the U.S. did not experience any government shutdowns. And that was the case even with the passage of the 1884 Anti-Deficiency Act, which banned federal agencies from conducting activities or entering into contracts that haven’t been fully funded by Congress. But for almost a century, federal agencies simply continued operating during funding-gap periods, assuming that Congress would make up the difference later and that there was no need for them to shut down.
Oddly enough, the seed for future government shutdowns was planted in 1980 during President Jimmy Carter’s administration. The American Prospect wrote:
At the time, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) was nearly out of money, and President Carter was in a dispute with corrupt members of Congress who wanted to drastically cut back the agency’s enforcement powers. He asked then-Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti about the legal options, and Civiletti proceeded to invent the government shutdown.
In a blinkered and hyper-literalist exercise in hair-splitting so characteristic of the liberal legal establishment, Civiletti argued that “legal authority for continued operations either exists or it does not,” and so if Congress hasn’t passed a specific appropriation for an agency, it has to shut down. ... Naturally, Civiletti later had to amend his strict reading of the statute because, well, stopping paychecks to soldiers or shutting down every airport in the country would be really bad.
To put it simply, Civiletti’s opinion meant no budget, no spending. The first government shutdown took place a year later after President Ronald Reagan vetoed a funding bill because he felt it should have cut more from domestic spending. That shutdown only lasted a few days.
Since then, according to the History Channel’s website, there have been nine more government shutdowns. The most recent one—from Dec. 21, 2018, to Jan. 25, 2019—was the longest shutdown in U.S. history. That dispute was triggered when Democrats refused to fund Trump’s proposed plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The American Prospect wrote that it would be difficult to end the shutdown threat by returning to the pre-1980 legal status quo because Congress amended the Anti-Deficiency Act in 1982 “with somewhat clearer language formalizing the shutdown procedure, including an exception for `emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property.’”
let’s talk about the debt ceiling
Now there’s one other aspect of our democracy that is truly exceptional, namely the debt ceiling, which has been in effect since 1917. The debt ceiling has been raised 78 times since 1917 with little conflict until 1995. That’s when the new Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich threatened to take the government into default for the first time unless President Bill Clinton bowed to Republican demands for a balanced budget.
The latest debt ceiling fight played out this spring. In early June, Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 after striking a deal with then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as time was running out to avert a financially disastrous default on the U.S. debt. Congress passed legislation suspending the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt limit past the presidential election to Jan. 1, 2025, and capped nondefense discretionary spending.
But just a few months later, the nihilists in the House Freedom Caucus forced McCarthy to renege on the deal and demanded more draconian spending cuts than previously negotiated. And that brought the country to the brink of a government shutdown. On Sept. 30, Congress passed a short-term spending bill, known as a continuing resolution, to keep the government open for another 45 days.
Just how exceptional is the debt ceiling? Denmark is the only other democratic nation with a similar type of nominal debt limit, according to CNBC. But Denmark has managed to avoid any acrimonious fights over its debt limit.
That’s largely because the Danish debt ceiling, which was introduced in 1993, was set so high that it would never become a “political bargaining chip” as it has become in the U.S., Laura Sunder-Plassmann, associate professor of economics at the University of Copenhagen, told CNBC. She also said that Danish politics is less politically polarized than the U.S.
how do we make it stop?
So is there anything that can be done to eliminate these recurring fights over raising the debt ceiling and avoiding government shutdowns? In July, after Republicans took the nation to the brink of default once again, Biden established a working group to study ways to circumvent future crises over the debt ceiling. Bloomberg News reported:
The effort will consider actions Congress can take as well as what the administration is calling “Constitution-based” solutions to avert future debt-ceiling standoffs. ...
“Now that the latest debt ceiling crisis is behind us, it is necessary to explore all legal and policy options to prevent Congress from ever again holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States,” the White House statement said.
Laurence Tribe, Harvard University professor of constitutional law emeritus, told Bloomberg News: “The only solution, in my view, is for Congress to grab this bull by the horns and permanently eliminate the statutory ceiling.”
As for government shutdowns, Politico reported that there is a bipartisan movement in the Senate, led by Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, to end shutdowns. A letter began circulating among lawmakers last month addressed to Republican and Democratic House and Senate leaders, pushing legislation that would automatically fund the government past spending deadlines.
Politico wrote:
“A number of senators, on a bipartisan basis, would like a vote on a bill authored by Senators Lankford and Hassan,” the letter reads. “The Prevent Government Shutdowns Act would do exactly what the title suggests. It’s a simple bill that offers an eminently reasonable solution to one form of recurring congressional gridlock.”
Their bill would amend the budget procedure to trigger automatic two-week stopgap spending bills, and require Congress to focus solely on spending bills if Congress misses a funding deadline. The bill has bipartisan support in the Senate but faces an uphill battle in the House given the influence of the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus members, who would be loath to give up their hostage-taking power by threatening government shutdowns.
Ryan Cooper, writing in The American Prospect, said:
The fact that shutdowns are even possible, like the anachronistic debt ceiling, is evidence of a profound rot in the American political system. Passing a budget—thereby setting out the rate of taxation and various fees, the funding of government agencies and the military, and so forth—is perhaps the single most important routine task of any government. Heck, it’s half the reason for having a government in the first place. One of the main reasons they did not happen for longer than a few hours or days before the 1990s was a widely shared norm that certain basic functions of government ... should be outside political disputes. It was only with the Gingrich revolution in 1994, which brought a bunch of irresponsible, dimwitted loudmouths into Congress, that the norm was shattered.
Since then, the right wing of the Republican caucus has only gotten louder, dumber, and even more irresponsible. It seems quite unlikely that any end to shutdowns could be passed with the Freedom Caucus de facto running the House. But should they lose power in 2024, yahoo-proofing the government should be a top priority for all Democrats, and any Republicans who can see sense. A simple one-sentence bill could rescue the budgetary hostage forever; another one could end the possibility of debt default. And who knows, without the ability to harm the American people through muleheaded intransigence, the Freedom Caucus might have to learn to negotiate.
Both sides working together? We’re not holding our breath on that one.
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