Americans quickly feel impact of budget battle
WASHINGTON— Day One of America’s newly imploded government unfolded in a flurry of confusion, anger and apprehension as the country turned away from the blamestorming in Washington and began to take stock of what shutdown really means.
The darkening of the PandaCam at Washington National Zoo. An octogenarian push by army veterans, tossing aside barricades to pay homage at the National World War II Memorial. And word from the National Institutes of Health that at least 30 children will not receive cancer care for the duration of the crisis.
Such were the headlines of a Tea Party-orchestrated budget showdown that halted all but “essential” U.S. federal operations at midnight Monday, leaving an estimated 800,000 workers furloughed.
Canadian eyes, meanwhile, watched it with wary, if neighbourly, nerves. Ambassador Gary Doer, now a veteran of four different budget meltdowns in his three years in Washington, said uncertainty itself is bad news.
The big issue is not so much the shutdown’s drip-drip-drip drain on the U.S. economy, but the uncertainty of whether compromise will be found by Oct. 17, when the U.S. bumps up once more against its debt ceiling, a crisis of far greater magnitude.
“I prefer the predictability of a budget as we have in Canada over the unpredictability of lurching from one fiscal crisis to another,” Doer told CTV dryly.
There was never any expectation that the shutdown would put an immediate dent in cross-border trade. And, true enough, Canada’s border crossing wait times Tuesday were largely unaffected with no significant change in the estimated $1.2 million-per-minute flow of goods and services.
Yet U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency oversees that economic relationship, is taking a hit, with 11.5 per cent of its workforce deemed non-essential.
Meanwhile, blame was apportioned in all directions on Tuesday, both in Washington and throughout the politically fragmented echo chambers of the media. But a clear preponderance of that blame is falling on House Republicans, a few of whom now are rebelling opening against their own kind.
Their goal is to undo a law that is signed, sealed — and as of Tuesday — very much delivered. President Barack Obama’s signature health-care reform, passed in 2010, went into effect amid a websitecrashing deluge of online traffic early in the day, as uninsured Americans signed themselves up.
Rep. Devin Nunes, the California Republican who a day earlier turned on his hardline colleagues, calling them “lemmings with suicide vests,” added more heat Tuesday, wondering why the headlong rush to a political dead end.
“If you’re going to take these extreme measures, you better have a plan to win,” Nunes said. “And I don’t know there is a plan to win.”
The House of Representatives moved to soften its stance late Tuesday, quickly passing three bills aimed at funding and reopening certain high-visibility departments, including veteran services and national parks. But the White House immediately turned down the overture. And so, with no other sign of political movement, some watchers began settling in for a sustained standoff.
Such a scenario would see the U.S. government shutdown, thus far a purely do- mestic crisis (and one with 17 precedents), become enmeshed with talks to raise the U.S. debt ceiling before Oct. 17, when there’s a prospect of an unprecedented national debt default, with potentially global economic impact.
If it all sounds familiar, it should. Washington faced down, and eventually overcame, an earlier debt ceiling impasse in August 2011. But not without spasms of political brinkmanship that prompted Standard & Poor’s to hand the country is first-ever credit rating downgrade.
With the added dimension of a govern- ment shutdown, the battle lines this time are more complex and the political risks higher. As pressure mounts and blame piles up, Doer held out hope that the heat will burn away the political obstructions before real damage is done.
“As they did in 2011, hopefully they can find a day to move beyond the partisan politics,” said Doer. “That’s tentative … it’s not certain at this point.”