Colby Cosh,

The popular perception of American government is that the president is a sort of fierce primitive god who controls the economic weather and makes dams, bridges, armies, and walls appear. Trump is a president who seems to not only rely on this but to really believe it.

TRUMP JOURNALISM IS OBSESSIVE, MANIC AND ... ADVERSARIAL. — REX MURPHY

As occasionally happens, the U.S. government is now “shut down” as a consequence of a conflict over budget appropriations between the president and the Congress. Except, of course, it isn’t anything of the sort. Otherwise we Canadians would be meeting with other functioning states to decide what pieces of the United States to break off for ourselves, the way European powers used to do with Poland from time to time. (Newspaper ethics forbid me from publishing a web address for my $29.95 “Make Maine Canada Again” hats.)

The “essential” parts of the U.S. federal government, including the bits that guarantee the territorial integrity of the country, always keep on trucking through these “shutdowns.” (The National Guard is sometimes affected, but on this occasion the Guard has been taken care of by a spending bill that passed in October.) Social Security and Medicare roll on unimpeded. The functions of government that get held up are the ones whose delay or abandonment cause inconvenience — albeit serious, economically harmful inconvenience — rather than anarchy.

If you grow curious about these American “shutdowns,” perhaps because they did not happen before 1981 and do not really happen anywhere else, you discover that this kabuki-like feature is not really a coincidence. As much as Congress and the president may fight very earnestly over things like border walls, they have a common interest in the overall health of the state.

The U.S. Constitution says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This is a shared element of America’s legal DNA and the British Empire’s: U.S. government shutdowns are, in a weird way, a distant echo of early-modern money struggles betwixt King and Parliament. Westminster-style governments, however, have evolved so as to minimize the possibility of ugly standoffs between the executive and the legislature. The U.S., not so much.

In the 19th century, departments of the U.S. federal government, most of which were still of the sort we would now label “essential,” developed the corrupt habit of using the appropriations rule as a weapon. The Post Office or the Army would blow through their budgets greedily in a matter of weeks and go hold up Congress for more. Congress naturally got tired of this and developed a body of law known collectively as the Antideficiency Act. The ADA required federal departments dependent on annual congressional allocations to spend the money in monthly chunks, and it criminalized the creation of obligations or contracts for which Congress had not yet earmarked cash.

The resulting system worked for most of the 20th century. Government agencies stopped holding Congress to ransom in the traditional manner. When there were rare impasses between Congress and the president over budget issues, they might lead to a pause in cash spending, but employees of those departments kept coming in personally and doing their work. Desks were manned: trials and hearings carried on. In the spring of 1980, however, someone noticed that the Constitution and the Antideficiency Act seemingly combined to make this behaviour not only unlawful but punishable. The U.S. government technically isn’t allowed to just fly on autopilot, even though that is always what it had done. Under the ADA, government employees working through a funding gap could be seen as incurring unfunded obligations to themselves, and thus committing a crime, whether or not they expected to be repaid.

The issue came before Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti, in the expectation that he would find a sensible solution. But Civiletti was intimidated by the Constitution, and was unwilling to strategically misread the ADA. He took the strict noautopilot view of the law, and declared his intention to enforce it. But he did invent — there is no other word for it — an exception for government operations involving “the safety of human life or the protection of property.”

Civiletti is still alive, but is, as far as I can tell, careful to avoid interviews on this subject. The era of sporadic “shutdowns” began almost immediately, since the United States coincidentally (or not) dumped Carter for a president who regarded big government with distaste. Ronald Reagan was confident that shutdowns would hurt the prestige of the federal bureaucracy more than they would diminish his own standing.

The current president has no doubt made a similar political calculation, perhaps by instinct alone. His instincts are not to be underestimated. The Constitution says that Congress shall control the federal purse, but the popular perception of American government is that the president is a sort of fierce primitive god who controls the economic weather and makes dams, bridges, armies, and walls appear.

Trump is a president who seems to not only rely on this but to really believe it. He is trying to obtain the money for his southern border wall by moral force, trusting that the transitory suffering created by the shutdown will be attributed to the blasphemers on Capitol Hill. And I am not sure this depends at all on how Americans evaluate the border fence as a policy idea. Although there is some evidence — including the late midterm elections — that Trump’s confrontational style is actually making the U.S. median voter more liberal on immigration, trade, and other nationalism issues.

PARTS OF THE U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ... KEEP ON TRUCKING.