[music]

Melissa: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, thanks for being with us.

[music]

As the 117th Congress comes to an end in the next couple of weeks, we are once again facing a looming government shutdown. Congress has until midnight on Friday to reach a deal to avoid this partial government closure. This comes as Democrats and Republicans debate over a $1.5 trillion Omnibus bill that would fund the government through the end of September 2023. Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer asked for members to be prepared to pass a short-term continuing resolution that would give Congress an extra week to hash out the funding bill before the holidays.

Chuck: I'm optimistic we could take action on the CR rather quickly and avoid the shutdown that neither side wants, and that is a one-week CR.

Melissa: Of course, you already know this isn't the first time we faced a potential government shutdown this year. On September 30th, Congress narrowly avoided a shutdown by just 12 hours passing a stopgap measure that kicked the shutdown can down the road to where we are today. If it feels the threat of a looming shutdown happens on an annual basis, it's because it does. Just last December, Congress punted their spending deadline into the new year and didn't pass a government funding bill until March of this year.

In fact, we've shut it down 21 times since 1976. While it might seem that saves a little money, it turns out turning off the federal government is pretty expensive. The 35-day shutdown during the Trump administration was the longest in history and according to the Congressional Budget Office, it reduced gross domestic product by a total of $11 billion. A Senate report estimated that the last three shutdowns cost taxpayers about 4 billion.

[music]

Joining me now is Roben Farzad, host of Full Disclosure on Virginia Public Radio. Roben, it's nice to have you with us.

Roben: Nice to be back with you.

Melissa: All right, walk us through the possibility of the shutdown. How likely is this to happen?

Roben: Let me just say rhetorically, one of my regrets as a journalist is in my copy, I never got to use the term Kabuki theater, I thought I wanted to flex that. This is exactly what this is. You mentioned how many times since 1976, how many times we've had this happen just over the past decade or since the credit rating downgrade in 2011, and now the cry wolf scenario is, as you mentioned, lawmakers have until Friday to pass a short-term spending bill. Which they call a continuing resolution that's going to keep the government funded merely for another week if they don't do so, theoretically, the government could go into shutdown.

I don't know how likely that is. You've already had the Senate majority and minority leaders telegraph that they're open to more than just kicking the can down three, four days. The question is how much the right flank of the Republican Party, which is going to be in power in the house, and Kevin McCarthy, who's gunning for the leadership, is going to be able to thwart this. I hate the verb weaponized, but that's the idea. The over stuff that's otherwise mundane and already accounted for, you can hold up the entire budget, the entire economy, the entire credit rating for what in the end is about $26 billion, which separates both sides.

Melissa: Which sounds like a lot of money in a household. When we're talking about $1.5 trillion under this bill, it's actually just at the margins. What is being debated? What are the key sticking points?

Roben: The agreement is on the chunky defense appropriations, which is at $858 billion. That's actually 10% more than the last go-round, which was $782 billion. The sticking point is about 813 billion in non-defense spending, which is 11% higher than what was called for before. You have certain Republican leaders out there saying that you guys got a lot of stuff out there with the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan and this is just another attempt to get wasteful government spending past the goalie.

There are specific cuts that Republicans want, they want a slash funding for the IRS and they want certain climate initiatives cut, but $26 billion in the grand scheme of, more than a trillion dollars, $2 trillion is not great shake. Again, if you can rhetorically weaponize it and say that we're going to make a stand against wasteful spending at a time of inflation, you can imagine how compelling that is, especially as Republicans. McCarthy is gunning to get those 218 votes and he needs everybody from the Freedom Caucus.

Melissa: You've brought up Freedom Caucus twice now, this right flank. There have been far more shutdowns since 2013 in this bunching of the use of this as you've called it, kabuki theater, this strategy than we had seen previously. Do you see this as a symptom of polarization and division within Congress?

Roben: Of course, it's I got mine. I remember when the bailouts were passed and everything, and you had these Tea Party activists standing up and banging against me creeping socialism that were bailing out Wall Street and bailing out all these other people and bailing out homeowners. It's great to invade against in practice, had you, for example, let those firms collapse Lehman Brothers if BEVA wasn't bailed out if the government didn't step up with TARP and AIG, could you imagine that the tab everybody would have to pick up afterward?

In practicality, in practice, it's just very hard. If you have an actual shutdown, if it's not just rhetorical fodder in this case and Brinksmanship, you could see VA hospitals shut down. You could see essential services road building, buttresses everywhere in the social safety net that are gone and that's going to force the government's hand anyway with an emergency resolution. This game, this trick, has been tried so many times that you get the impression now that the elder likes of McConnell and Schumer are yawning at it like, sure, tickle me, let's try this again.

You're more than likely going to see a continuing resolution. The Republicans out there, McCarthy is saying, why should we give this up as a negotiating tactic? We're getting the whole house in January, why do this? He's being echoed in that by the Freedom Caucus. They're saying, we want to go in there and we want to be seen as being deficit hawks for the first time in several years. Another thing is what was spent at an emergency level in the throes of the pandemic to rescue people for essential care, for emergency unemployment, and what is ongoing social spending, that's something that the McCarthy Wing and his budding coalition wants to debate in January not now.

Melissa: We're talking about the Looming Government shutdown with Roben Farzad, host of Virginia Public Radio's, Full Disclosure. Roben, you started moving us towards thinking about what it costs us to actually shut down if that happens. Some of it is about the essential services. What are some of the other ways that it ends up costing us to shut down the government?

Roben: You see the friction in DC, you see the second order effects, janitors, people contractors who are brought in. I remember that the last time this happened, you had restaurants and others donating food to janitors and others who couldn't make ends meet because they're third parties and they're brought in and they're innocent victims. It's one thing to shake your fist against government bloat and general accounting office bloat and spending and everything, but a lot of people get hit in the crossfire. Veterans, essential services, people who've been waiting for things to clear the IRS.

It just gums up the entire works at the worst time of the year when things are slowing down anyway for the holidays. You really can't take for granted that this is a massive fiscal machine and it needs money to run and it expects to have the money to run. You can't have these semi-annual jolts to the system where suddenly we're not good for money. Oh wait, Peek-A-Boo, we are good for the money. Over time that just erodes trust in these institutions.

Melissa: Speaking of the shutdown what you're predicting here is that we will get a CR rather than a full-scale agreement. Democrats also wanted to raise the debt ceiling that's looking unlikely.

Roben: It's just hard to pull off because the debt ceiling, while it's a very mundane thing and it's been raised so many times in history, and you have to be good for the money and look if your credit card company sees that your credit worthy and everything, it'll increase your credit limit. In this case, I think the opposition has been able to say, by just raising the debt ceiling is we're giving you unending amounts of credit to go out and be propagated.

Again, that resounds rhetorically at a time of inflation and interest rates going higher, and budget deficits being worrisome, but it's not the reality of things, this is just mundane spending. You could finally get this all out of the way by extending the debt ceiling indefinitely, but there just isn't the will to do that. It just looks bad and people generally don't understand it. In reality, again, it's much more mundane than the brinksmanship that especially the right wing makes it out to be.

Melissa: In your eyes, is there any possibility still of substantive legislation coming through in these final weeks?

Roben: I really think back to McCarthy in the house and Senator Mitch McConnell in the Senate, the Senate minority leader. What's their incentive to do it? You have Donald Trump already announcing his candidacy. You could have, at the very least, a few day continuing resolution. What's their incentive to do it? Why would you want to disarm yourself If you're McCarthy, and I don't know to what extent McConnell is working in coordination with McCarthy, they're split interest. You have a whole new regime coming to power. You have an increase in the number of the Senate power with the Democrats, though the house is going to be operative in this case, and I don't know how much revenge the Freedom Caucus is going to take on McCarthy if he does anything more, even a continuing resolution of a few days, much less a full-year continuing resolution or acquiescing on the whole thing, on an omnibus bill and saying, you know what? You're right. This is irresponsible. Let's provide runway and funding. I just think he's going to be hit by his right flag.

Melissa: I'm also wondering just a little bit about the question of democratic accountability and democratic in this case with a little d, if part of what happens is that we just simply never vote on this issue. We just came out of the midterms and all those billions spent on all those campaign commercials. I can't think of a single commercial that said, "Hey, hold your member, your incumbent for either side, accountable for having shut down the government for having threatened to do it, for having not directed us towards a CR." I'm wondering if there are ways that challengers, whether from within parties or cross-party can start really maybe this is weaponizing it, but I also think of it as just reminding voters about the pain, the effort, the grandstanding that happens in these moments.

Roben: It's hard. It's like my son, when I get into bedtime at night, he wants to have existential conversations about the electoral college. Why aren't more people infuriated about this debt? It's just unjust. Why isn't one vote worth as much as the other vote in another state? It's hard to package again, rhetorically when people are worried about inflation, when you have a triple epidemic pandemic raging and they're worried about flu and getting their kids back to school and stock market returns and getting a mortgage and everything else.

Look, I thought we had a gut punch to the system and a wake-up call back in August of 2011 when Standard and Poor's cut the United States' credit rating, largely on playing chicken on the debt ceiling and these kinds of high drinks. That was supposed to be a big wake-up call. Did it punish us? Did it increase borrowing cost for the United States? No, we go on to have a great decade in markets and the debt expands significantly since then.

There's so many examples of brinksmanship and crying wolf and taking it to the very edge and pulling back from it that again, it just comes across as histrionics at a certain point. You have to have that Lehman Brothers moment where you feel more than the precipice. You feel the free fall to know what it's like for people to not get their checks for hundreds of thousands of people to not get paid in the service sector for things to grind to a halt for everybody to say, no, we are not going to count against that kind of misbehavior ever again. In the meantime, it's all captured in the theoretical.

Melissa: Roben Farzad is host a Full Disclosure on Virginia Public Radio. Robin, as always, thanks so much for joining us.

Roben: My pleasure. Thank you.

[music]

[00:13:04] [END OF AUDIO]

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.