The Real Takeaway from the Shutdown: Congress Is Broken

More than 48 hours after the 69-hour weekend government shutdown, party leaders and members of Congress continue to spin and assign blame. Who won the shutdown is mostly irrelevant to the weeks ahead, but the debate itself highlights more fundamental problems in American politics.The deeper issue is what this brief and soon-forgotten episode says about the broken legislative practices inside the halls of Congress. From immigration to health care, privacy to national security, there are bipartisan majorities on Capitol Hill willing to debate any number of important bills. The problem is they aren’t getting a say in what Congress debates. Congressional leaders care more about spin than deliberation. As a result, Congress has morphed from a democratic arena weighing important policy differences to a debate-stunted PR firm. This is not exactly new, but the 115th Congress is reaching new levels of dysfunction. And as long as leaders seek brinkmanship over debate, shutdowns will become only more common.

One reason is the growing power of hard-line activist groups, on both sides, to set the political agenda. Neither party really wanted a shutdown, but they valued other priorities more than keeping the government open. Democrats wanted to stand firm to protect from deportation the undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, under a program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA; Republicans would rather risk a shutdown than make any concessions that might accentuate their party’s internal divisions on immigration.

Strategically, Democrats got nothing of value from shuttering the government. They gained no leverage they didn’t already have. It didn’t make a DACA bill more likely to pass. If anything, it may have slightly weakened their hand in the short term.