WASHINGTON — At 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, the federal government officially shut down for the first time since the last time, with both chambers of Congress immediately taking to cable news to explain that the catastrophe unfolding behind them was, technically, the other guys’ fault.
The lapse in funding furloughed roughly 800,000 federal workers, suspended a long list of services Americans had no idea they were receiving, and triggered the only legislative process Congress has reliably executed on time this decade: the rapid deployment of pre-recorded floor speeches blaming everyone within a four-mile radius of the Capitol.
By 12:03 a.m., a Senate aide was already tweeting a graphic.
“Both sides are operating under a shared bipartisan framework,” said Reed Halloran, a fellow at the Brennan-Voss Institute for Procedural Studies, “in which the framework is that nobody does anything, everybody yells, and the paychecks keep clearing.” Halloran noted that Article I of the Constitution explicitly assigns Congress the power of the purse, a responsibility lawmakers have spent the better part of forty years trying to give back like an unwanted Christmas sweater.
Members of both parties spent Tuesday evening locked in the kind of high-stakes negotiations that produce no agreement, no continuing resolution, and an unusually large number of lower-thirds reading SOURCES SAY TALKS COLLAPSING. House leadership emerged briefly to announce they had been very close to a deal, the Senate had blown it up, and they would now be flying home to their districts to be absolutely furious about it from a Marriott ballroom.
Senate leadership emerged shortly after to announce that the House had blown it up, that they themselves had been within inches of a breakthrough, and that the American people deserved better than this — a sentiment delivered without irony by a man who has been in the chamber since 1987.
The President, asked Tuesday whether he would intervene, said he had been told the shutdown was “actually a beautiful thing” and that the people getting hurt were mostly people he didn’t like anyway. He then signed an executive order he was informed afterward did not legally exist.
Affected workers, for their part, reported the standard mix of resignation and rage. A TSA officer at Reagan National, working without pay until further notice, said he had stopped being surprised somewhere around the second shutdown of his career and now mostly tracked them the way other people track hurricanes. “You see the cone of uncertainty,” he said, “and you just buy the rice.”
Essential personnel — air traffic controllers, federal prison guards, and the staff of the congressional gym, which somehow remains open — reported to their posts as scheduled. Non-essential personnel, a category that pointedly does not include the 535 elected officials whose failure to pass a budget caused the shutdown, were instructed to check their email periodically for updates that will not arrive.
Lawmakers’ salaries, protected by a constitutional provision lawmakers wrote about lawmakers, will continue to be deposited on schedule.
By Wednesday afternoon, the Capitol had settled into the comfortable rhythm of a shutdown’s first full day: empty offices, full greenrooms, and a steady migration of senators toward whichever network had agreed to let them sigh heavily on camera. Aides confirmed the blame tour is booked through Friday, with overflow segments scheduled into the weekend pending ratings.
Asked when a deal might be reached, one senior staffer paused, looked toward the rotunda, and said the honest answer was “whenever the polling tells someone they’re losing.”