Ending shutdown just a start on restoring American values

At this writing, we finally appear poised to close the books on the longest federal shutdown in American history, exceeding that even of the 35-day closure marking the first Trump presidency.

But in addition to inflicting massive human and economic damage, it has exposed an alarming truth — the average American family is maintaining an increasingly tenuous grip on the means to meet its basic food, health and shelter needs, one shock away from a crisis point.

The decline of the middle class over recent decades has been well documented by scholars and commentators. An economy engineered to favor those already blessed with fortune has pushed the American Dream increasingly out of reach for ordinary working folk — the kind that used to be able to save enough not just to keep their kids clothed and fed, but also to buy cars and homes.

Nothing makes that point more graphically than political gamesmanship serving to double their healthcare costs, slash the federal food safety net and, through reckless imposition of tariffs wholly apart from the shutdown, unleash new inflationary pressures on them in the marketplace.

They are in desperate need of relief, and that relief needs to extend beyond just the lifting of a federal shutdown deliberately manipulated to inflict the most pain on those least able to withstand it.

How did we ever manage to get to this point? In a nutshell, poisonous politics on both the right and left.

For almost the entire first two centuries of our republic’s history, through the Civil War, Great Depression and two world wars, the federal government never shut down for lack of authorized operating revenue.

We experienced periodic lapses in appropriations, meaning Congress failed to officially appropriate funding for one or more agencies for brief periods after the Oct. 1 start of a new federal fiscal year. But historically, the affected agencies, brushing it off as a soon-to-be-remedied technicality, continued normal operations.

That all came to an end in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti, issued an opinion that continued government operation without formal new appropriation violated the Antideficiency Act of 1870, as codified in 1884.

Congress could have amended the act at any point to prevent it from triggering shutdowns, and still could. However, shutdowns and threat of shutdowns have become so thoroughly weaponized over the intervening years, because of men like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, that the party currently in power never seems willing to surrender such a daunting weapon.

Today’s Republican leadership tends to almost reflexively favor management over labor, on the premise the rewards of a free market economy will inevitably trickle down. But when has it ever actually proved the case in practice?

Every millionaire dreams of becoming a billionaire, every billionaire of becoming a trillionaire. We’re thinking of you here, Elon.

Because some manage to make their fortunes, many in GOP ranks seem to assume everyone else could as well if they simply worked hard enough. The party is thus prone to branding safety nets as an extension of welfare to undeserving slackers.

For its part, today’s Democratic Party seems sometimes to have fallen in love with ever more programs, ever more spending, ever more regulation. Can it not see regulation growing like ivy will eventually strangle even the most robust economic machine?

In Oregon, we see that point playing out in an unsustainable public pension program, an interminably litigious and restrictive land use planning system, and state policies serving to drive housing costs up and send major employers packing.

Cutting this Gordian knot won’t prove easy by any means.

However, we have a long history in America of leaders doing the right thing simply because it was the right thing, of leaders summoning the courage to work with counterparts on the other side of difficult issues to forge a new way forward.

Maybe we have to hit bottom to realize how critical that has become. Maybe we already have, in fact, hit bottom.

Let’s hope so, because we would hate to see an era more empty and venal than this one serving to unfold before us.