This week, more than a third of House Republicans urged Speaker John Boehner to let them shut down the government. A shutdown, they reason, would be the perfect crowbar to force the President and Senate Democratic majority to accept the defunding, and thus the death of, Obamacare.
Well, "those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it," as Santayana warned us. And the Tea Party wing of the GOP seems to have forgotten the winter of '95, when the wind chill factor that greeted the last Republican shutdown was fifty degrees below zero on the Gallup scale.
A Little History
Republicans rode into 1995 on the zephyr of a historic election victory. The Health Insurance Industry's front-family, Harry and Louise, had strangled Bill Clinton's Health Care Reform plan in its crib -- it never even made it out of committee, and voters punished the Democrats for it.
The GOP now held majorities in both House and Senate. Clinton himself was a wounded gazelle. Newt Gingrich and his pride of 73 zealous, hungry House Republican freshmen circled, and crouched.
Then, when Clinton refused to meet their demands for budget cuts, they sprang for the kill: they shut down the government, confident that the spineless "Slick Willie" would cave in to their demands, and that Americans would embrace their bold takedown.
But a funny thing happened on the way to hubris: no one caved, and few embraced. Clinton calmly declared that he was willing to compromise, but that he wouldn't be extorted into accepting drastic cuts in education, Medicare and other important programs.
Americans could only watch in dismay as the "non-essential" services of the U.S. government ended. Families who had planned a trip to a national park cancelled it. Businessmen who needed their passports renewed were grounded. Some people who needed a pension or public assistance check stared at their empty mailboxes, and so on.
Unexpectedly, Republicans found that the sheer size of the federal government was against them. Three hundred thousand federal workers were furloughed and another 480,000 "essential" workers were forced to work without pay. This army of the suddenly unemployed was spread throughout every city and state in the country.
These 3/4 of a million people, it turned out, had friends, neighbors and family members who cared about them. Even people who didn't know any federal employees were themselves emerging from a steep recession and could feel the pain of people who lost their jobs because government leaders refused to be adults and compromise.
As the shutdown began, polls showed that, unsurprisingly,
voters blamed the party that had refused to fund, and thus shut down the government, not the guy who begged them not to shut it down, and then beseeched them to open it up (49%-26%).
Gingrich's own disapproval rating leapt like a non-wounded gazelle, by 20 points. Then Bob Dole and other moderates in the Senate abandoned the sinking ship of the shutdown and voted to open the government. Privately, Gingrich admitted to Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, "We've made a mistake. Our strategy isn't working."
In the end, without concessions from Clinton, and despite the fury of the freshman zealots, House moderates recanted and put the "Open" sign back in the door.
Later that year, the once-wounded gazelle won re-election by a landslide and then, to furious applause, demanded in his State of the Union speech that Republicans "Never, ever shut the federal government down again."
Fortunately for the country, as well as for the Republican Party, cooler heads will probably prevail this time. Boehner himself was a member of the Republican leadership team in 1995, and is not spoiling for Round 2.
As for the House rank and file, the Tea Party members who signed the shutdown letter aren't worried about voter backlash. They tend to come from districts in the deep woods of the Deep South that are safe for far-right Republicans.
But many of their Republican colleagues were swept into office from competitive or even Democratic-leaning districts by the voter anger of 2010. They tend moderate, they have reason to fear voter backlash, and they're important: the House Republican Party would not be a majority without them. They will probably prevail on this issue and prevent the shutdown.
But let's not take false comfort from that. The ascendancy of the far Right in the Republican Party isn't over, not by a long shot, as we'll see in our next post. But as the Irish story tellers say in their conclusion, "sin scéal eile" -- that's another story.