So it’s come to this: The US is facing another government shutdown.
Unless the GOP-run House passes stopgap funding before Sunday, the federal government will stop paying millions of workers and military servicemembers. Some services, like parks, will stop entirely, while other federal employees will simply be expected to work without pay.
Government shutdowns used to be reasonably rare — there were zero under George W. Bush, and only one under Obama — but seem to be getting more common. Two occurred under Donald Trump’s administration, the second of which was the longest in modern American history, spanning over a month.
It doesn’t have to be like this; the whims of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Republican Party’s hard-core members don’t have to determine whether federal workers get paid or not. Instead, we could eliminate shutdowns altogether using something called an automatic CR.
Usually, when the federal government shuts down or is on the verge of shutting down, the issue is resolved in the short term by passing a “continuing resolution” (or CR): a bill saying, basically, that the government should stay the course and keep spending what it’s been spending, maybe give or take a few minor tweaks. In the average year, CRs fund the government for 137 out of 365 days.
By extension, we could eliminate government shutdowns forever by enacting an automatic CR: a law that says that in the event that Congress fails to authorize funding for the government, things will just keep going along the way they’ve been.
This isn’t a purely hypothetical idea. In September 2013, just as the government was about to shut down, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed an automatic CR that applied only to the US military. It was called the Pay Our Military Act, and it enabled the Defense Department to largely, though not entirely, avoid the worker furloughs and other cutbacks necessitated by the 2013 shutdown. The act applied only to that…
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