The Coming Government Shutdown: A Dumb, Dumb, Dumb Idea

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

September 30, 2013

The Coming Government Shutdown: A Dumb, Dumb, Dumb Idea

So . . . what do we on the Right get with a government shutdown?

Because here are some of the things that happen in a government shutdown:

Death benefits to military families won't get mailed out.

About 1.4 million active-duty military personnel remain on the job but won't get paid until a new deal is signed into law -- or unless the Senate passes and the president signs a separate military pay bill the House passed 423-0. Active National Guard units also must continue to work. About half the Pentagon's civilian workforce (roughly 400,000 workers) are furloughed -- temporary unpaid leave until further notice.

All Smithsonian Museums and the Smithsonian's National Zoo close to the public. All National Parks close.

Most workers at the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs are furloughed as "nonessential" and won't be around to process visa and passport applications. If you don't have a passport, you won't be getting a passport.

Most of the federal law-enforcement personnel stay on the job, but not all: At the FBI, 30,208 of 35,267 employees are deemed essential and stay on the job. At the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA): 7,437 of 8,842 employees are excepted, and at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF): 4,206 of 5,117 employees are excepted.

Regarding illegal immigration, "Citizens and U.S. businesses will not be able to access E-Verify, the Internet- based system that allows employers to voluntarily determine the eligibility of prospective employees to work in the United States. Over 404,000 employers are enrolled, with more than 21 million queries run through the system during FY 2012."

No official has discussed how a shutdown would impact the intelligence community, but they are impacted, and back in 2011 there was some general discussion:

"The IC (intelligence community) has been looking very carefully at this," one official said.

The key question, the official said, is what do agency managers believe are "essential" intelligence operations.

Intelligence agencies plan to furlough employees deemed engaged in "nonessential" work. The spy units have already made extensive plans outlining which workers are considered essential and which are not.

"Employees whose work is critical to national security will continue to work during a funding lapse," said one senior intelligence official.

Workers assigned to cases examining long-term threats, or broad strategic problems, might face involuntary furloughs, while officials assigned to track down urgent threats would stay on the job.

The good (or bad, depending on your perspective) is that Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and unemployment benefit checks still go out. (If you're applying to get Social Security benefits, you're in trouble, because the workers won't be there to process the request.) The U.S. Postal Service will be unaffected. The shutdown will interrupt IRS audits.

And the exchanges for Obamacare open Tuesday, November 1, even with a shutdown. (Presuming software glitches don't crash the system anyway.)

For a significant number of Americans -- most notably military families, if that separate military pay bill doesn't move quickly -- this is a lot of grief and aggravation. And for what? What's the upside?

We on the right can, and will, correctly argue that the shutdown is largely the fault of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama, for refusing to accept a one-year delay in Obamacare's individual mandate, or for refusing to compromise on anything else about the program. Obama, Reid, and all of their allies insist that the administration can unilaterally decide which parts of the bill to postpone or suspend. Many in the media will insist it's all the fault of those Republican bogeymen. It's possible that a shutdown will hurt Obama as much as it hurts Republicans. But even if the public reaction is, "a pox on both your houses," that doesn't necessarily improve fortunes for the Right as a whole.

Let's say the government shutdown goes on for a week. Then what? Is the Republican leverage strengthened? Is the Obama administration's position weakened? Is the calculation that Obama will accept a delay in the individual mandate after some period of tear-jerking coverage of military families? Two weeks? A month? How does the means (the shutdown) get us to the ends (stopping Obamacare)?

Is it that a shutdown is good strategy because "it shows the Tea Party that Congressional Republicans are willing to stand and fight"? How much are you willing to bet on 218 House Republicans sticking together as the shutdown goes on? What's the point of going into a fight if one of your flanks is likely to collapse?

Senator Tom Coburn (Alleged RINO, Oklahoma) said, "You do not take a hostage you are not going to for sure shoot. And we will not for sure shoot this hostage." But as I read the conservative blogosphere, I increasingly suspect that there are quite a few folks on the right who are perfectly willing to shoot the hostage. Perhaps it's a reflection of increasing distrust of government at all levels:

A new poll from the George Washington University out this week shows that 35 percent of registered voters said they have "little or no confidence" in federal workers, up sharply from 23 percent just two years ago. Just one in five Americans say they have "lot of confidence" in government employees.

Adams said that the heightened wariness about federal workers included steep increases among independents and even Democrats --who have traditionally been more supportive of civil servants than conservatives.

However, the "little or no confidence" sentiment still strongest among self-identified conservative Republicans -- 45 percent of them. The rest of the public feels more mixed: 19 percent of voters said they have "a lot of confidence" in federal workers, while 41 percent indicated "some confidence," and 5 percent were unsure.

Shutting down the government to "punish" Obama and federal workers may feel cathartic at the moment, but it is likely to weaken the leverage of the House GOP and with it, the cause of limited government.

Ultimately, nothing may persuade the public about the undesirability of Obamacare more than living under it.

Why Is Obama So Sanguine About Implementing Obamacare?

Last week I noted the disconnect between the president's rhetoric on Obamacare (expect some "hiccups") and the actual problems in its implementation, which you've seen with all the train-wreck gifs around here: the program's impact on full-time employment, its malfunctioning software, the program's failure to ensure coverage for 500,000 children, and the way lower-income families that have good insurance plans will be forced to pay much more for them, the difficulty working families will have for the 'affordable' plans, the fact that the exchange web sites can't make key calculations, and so on.

NR cruiser Bruce Webster wrote in, diagnosing what he sees as a familiar pattern when a large organization begins an extensive, complicated technical project. In short, Obama thinks everything is going fine because most of the bad news hasn't climbed up the organization's ladder yet:

For nearly 20 years, my professional focus has been on large-scale IT projects: why they succeed and why they so often fail. One of my observations -- which dates all the way back to my time as a contract programmer at Apple Computer in the late 1980s -- is that

In many large or even medium-sized IT projects, there exists a thermocline of truth, a line drawn across the organizational chart that represents a barrier to accurate information regarding the project's progress. Those below this level tend to know how well the project is actually going; those above it tend to have a more optimistic (if unrealistic) view.

I wrote a post about this on my professional blog several years ago, and I keep coming back to this concept, mostly because it keeps reappearing in real life. In that post, I talked about the various reasons for the thermocline, then observed:

As the project delivery deadline draws near, the thermocline of truth starts moving up the levels of management because it is becoming harder and harder to deny or hide just where the project stands. Even with that, the thermocline may not reach the top level of management until weeks or even just days before the project is scheduled to ship or go into production. This leads to the classic pattern of having a major schedule slip -- or even outright project failure -- happen just before the ship/production date.

I think we're starting to see that as the 'go-live' date for Obamacare approaches. The Obama Administration has already unilaterally deferred various aspect of Obamacare, for reasons that I suspect are both political and practical. But the individual mandate has not been deferred (yet), which means that all the various state exchanges are supposed to be up and functioning next week. Some problems are already being reported, and I suspect quite a few more are going to crop up.

The Weekly Sunday Night Near-Heart-Attack Known as "Homeland"

I now have Showtime, so I can watch Homeland in real time, instead of bingeing several episodes at a time when visiting relatives.

Think of it as 24 without the ticking-clock gimmick (it shares some of the creative team from 24) with a much more ripped-from-the-headlines feeling. No fictional government agencies or terror groups here; the heroes work for the Central Intelligence Agency, the bad guys are al-Qaeda and their affiliates, and the stakes are very, very high. The protagonists are maddeningly flawed humans, the villains inscrutable and unspeakably cruel, and the atmosphere is as tense as anything on television.

There is a bit of a flaw in its whole concept, though. (SPOILERS, if you haven't watched the show).

From its opening episode, Homeland offered a daring, unnerving premise: Was rescued prisoner of war Marine gunnery sergeant Nicholas Brody actually a sleeper agent for al-Qaeda? And the answer (SPOILER ALERT) was . . . mostly. Wikipedia summarizes:

The episode "Crossfire" reveals that [terror mastermind Abu] Nazir ended Brody's torture in 2008 and brought him into his home, asking him to teach his son Issa English. Brody soon grew to love the boy as his own son. In 2009, however, Issa was killed in a drone strike while attending school. Brody helped Nazir bury his son and joined him in reciting an Islamic prayer over the child's grave. Shortly thereafter, Brody watched a television appearance by Vice President William Walden who falsely claimed that no children were killed in the drone strike. Brody swore revenge on Walden and agreed to kill him in a suicide attack.

The second season ended with a terrible terror bombing blowing up part of CIA headquarters and killing most of the agency's senior management. As the third season begins, our protagonists are worried that Congress may very well disband the CIA, and we're introduced to an antagonistic senator chairing hearings pledging to get to the bottom of why the CIA failed so spectacularly.

Here's the flaw: The CIA, as seen in Homeland, probably ought to be disbanded, or at least completely reorganized; time and again, its leadership goes well beyond moral gray areas and dives deep into the charcoal realm. As seen above, they're firing Hellfire missiles into schools and then lying about the death toll. They uncover indisputable evidence that Brody is a sleeper agent, and then instead of putting him behind bars, try (and seem to succeed) in turning him into a spy for the agency. (Charging him with crimes and informing the public of the truth is never considered.) The deputy director then plots to assassinate Brody, who in the interim has been appointed a congressman (don't ask). The aforementioned vice president covers up his teenage son's vehicular homicide of a woman, and the agency interferes with the investigation of this crime. Finally, the agency repeatedly entrusts many lives into the hands of an emotionally disturbed, sometimes mentally unstable officer (Claire Danes), who ends up having an affair with Brody.

We're supposed to share the protagonists' horror at the prospect of seeing the CIA disbanded or completely reorganized, but after all we've seen . . . would it really be that much worse?

ADDENDA: September has ended. Somebody wake up Green Day.

Here's Sunday's appearance on Howard Kurtz's Media Buzz:

NRO Digest — September 30, 2013

Today on National Review Online . . .

ELIANA JOHNSON: Mike Lee's quiet conservative leadership. The Other Defunder.

ROBERT COSTA & JONATHAN STRONG: Battling opponents on both sides of the aisle, Boehner struggles to avert a shutdown. The Speaker's Slog.

JOHN FUND: Bill de Blasio is ACORN's candidate for New York City mayor. ACORN Is Baaack.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Even if Obamacare's implementation can be improved, it's still bad for Americans' health. Obamacare: Wrong in Practice, Wrong in Theory.

SLIDESHOW: Meme Watch.

To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com

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