Ryan Achuff
4/5/2014
Block 1
Rebooting the Government The United States government has shut down a total of 18 times in the history of its existence, including the most recent in the fall of 2013. These occur when the two majority parties can’t come to a conclusion on a spending bill or if the president decides to veto it. The reason being is that the government is not legally entitled to spend money. When money can’t be put down to fund certain agencies, they begin to dissipate resulting in a shutdown of the entire system. They have shown to cause drastic effects, demonstrated throughout the several times occurring in the past. Each one is cause by a different reason but the majority deal with unfair and unequal spending/funding of services and agencies. The United States is no stranger to shutting down. The first of which took place in the fall of 1976, spanning a total of 10 days from September 30th to October 11th. It was on the basis of the Departments of Labor and Health, Education, and Welfare. The conflict arose when the President Ford, the president at the time, vetoed a bill which would have funded those departments. His argument was that it didn’t meet the requirements for restraining spending adequately to those departments. It was resolved when congress overruled the president’s veto and created a continuing resolution that sought to end funding gaps, which became law. The second most recent to the one of last fall occurred December 5, 1995 to January 6, 1996, lasting a total of 21 days, making it the longest shutdown in the United States history. Republicans pushed for the proposal of a seven year budget plan basing off of the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) readings as opposed to the Office of Management and Budget readings, which were believed to be too optimistic. This resulted in a shutdown of the government on the basis of a disagreement between President Clinton’s beliefs and the Republican leaders during that time. It was finally resolved when the republican’s gave up and agreed to pass legislation to reinstate the government. It is not always directly the President’s business either; however they do have to contribute to resolving due to the shear fact that they have to take care of their country and do what is best for the American people. Often enough, the President does have a direct correlation to the problem at hand either through vetoing or disagreeing with the beliefs of some congress members. The most recent shutdown took place from October 1, 2013 until October 16, 2013. Congress failed to pass a spending bill that would fund certain services throughout the government. It shut down on October 1st because that was the end of one fiscal year in congress and the start of another. Their primary task was to pass a bill by the end of the fiscal year, which they failed to do based on disagreements in funding, thus resulting in a temporary shutdown of many unfunded agencies. They main cause of this dispute was over The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Since President Obama is a democrat, he had the democratic side of congress backing him on his decisions while the republican side disagreed. This disagreement grew as House Republicans insisted that any new bills include provisions to defund or derail Obamacare whereas the Senate Democrats insisted that it did the exact opposite. The laws on health care doesn’t have a direct part on why the government shut down, but it’s more so that some Republicans think that Obamacare is going to have nothing but negative results if it is put in place. They believed that it became worth disrupting the entire United States government funding in order to prevent it. These shutdowns can have colossal impacts on the