Republicans have partially planned and partially blundered into a government shutdown, and they appear to have no clear exit strategy. For now, many of them think it has become a test of their manhood. If they blink and pass a “clean” spending bill, they will lose face and enter talks over the looming mid-October debt-ceiling fight in a weakened position.
“We’re not going to be disrespected,” Representative Marlin Stutzman, an Indiana Republican, told the Washington Examiner. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.” That kind of thinking doesn’t inspire confidence.
Timing is everything. For now, Republicans are holding together, but in about a week the financial markets are likely to go down, putting immense pressure on Republicans to abandon the shutdown fight. In 2011, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by more than 15 percent over a three-week period during that fall’s budget and debt-ceiling fight.
Deeply ingrained in the psyche of every congressional Republican is the government shutdown of 1995, for which Republicans were blamed. While many Republicans now believe the shutdown was a mistake, more think the problem was that the party lost its nerve.
Former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, now host of ABC’s This Week, has validated that view. In his memoir, he wrote that Democrats, until then holding out against the Republicans’ budget-limiting efforts, were close to blinking. “Clinton was grumpy, the rest of us were grim,” until suddenly news came that Senate majority leader Bob Dole and House speaker Newt Gingrich were blinking first. “Whether the cause was hubris, naïveté, or a failure of nerve,” Stephanopoulos explained, “the Republicans had blown their best chance to splinter our party; from that point on, everything started breaking our way.”
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