The chattering class is understandably busy mulling over which party will get blamed if the government does indeed shut down on Saturday. That’s a perfectly worthy discussion in which to engage, but it’s predicated on the misleading notion that a shutdown would harm either Republicans or Democrats but not both.
Everybody loses when the government shuts down.
To be clear, the blame won’t be apportioned equally. Historical patterns suggest the party in power will probably shoulder most of it — that’s obviously bad news for Republicans. But polling shows even supporters of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (permanent legal relief for immigrants who entered illegally as children) do not believe it’s worth shutting down the government over, and Democrats’ inclination to prioritize protections for noncitizens over the American workers who would be harmed in a shutdown seems like a tough sell.
A CBS News poll released Thursday — conducted just days ago among 1,225 adults — found neither a majority of respondents who favor DACA or a majority of respondents who favor the border wall believe those policies are worth shutting down the government over. In both cases, more adults actually believed a shut down would not be worth achieving those policy goals (although the difference among DACA supporters was within the poll’s margin of error).
Those questions, however, are probably even less relevant to the impact of a potential shutdown than another question posed in the poll, one which had absolutely nothing to do with that scenario.
When asked whether they would like to see more or less cooperation between Democrats and Republicans in Washington than there was last year, 92 percent of adults favored more cooperation.
For Americans who (mercifully) aren’t swamped in the minutiae of congressional negotiations, shutdowns smack of bipartisan dysfunction. They do not like that. It erodes trust in government.
It’s beyond dispute that we’re living through a moment where anti-establishment sentiments are high and trust in Washington (and its institutions) is low. The White House is widely perceived as existing in a perpetual state of chaos. The president and his opponent in 2016 were both unpopular among many their own parties. Shutdowns are never good news, but this time around the failure to reach an agreement will be salt in the wound of decaying faith in Washington.
That hurts both parties, and it hurts us all.
