Right as Democrats swept Tuesday’s off-year elections, reclaiming a trifecta in Virginia and keeping New Jersey indigo blue, the party’s shutdown of the federal government set the record as the longest in the nation’s history. The overlap of the two events is no coincidence: nearly a quarter of Virginia’s electorate works for the federal government, two-thirds of whom voted for Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger. By the time the shutdown hit the 35-day mark on election night, some 2.5 million federal workers, a disproportionate share of whom live in Virginia, were going without their paychecks.
The nominal reason congressional Democrats have refused — 14 times in a row now — to authorize the Republican continuing resolution that would reopen the federal government at Biden-era spending levels is that they wish for Republicans to spend an extra $350 billion to extend Biden’s enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies permanently. The actual reason Democrats refused to reopen the government was to prove to its apoplectic voters it was #DoingSomething to stand up to President Donald Trump and thus win the off-year elections. Democrats have gotten what they wanted. Now is the time for them to take the win and reopen the government.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is reportedly telling Republicans that he suspects enough Democrats will vote on Friday to reopen the government until January, and Republicans are reportedly offering the reversal of some shutdown-specific federal firings as a face-saving sweetener to Democrats.
If Democrats do not accept, and if they still insist that holding the paychecks of 2.5 million federal workers and the entire federal government hostage is a valid negotiation strategy to undermine the enhanced ACA expiration date that the Democratic Party specifically choose and approved as a part of Biden’s 2022 reconciliation law, it’s important to understand the scope of the economic destruction they will own.
Because air traffic controllers, who have been forced to work without pay for over five weeks now, are increasingly and dangerously understaffed, the Federal Aviation Administration has ordered 40 of the nation’s busiest airports to reduce traffic by 10% by the middle of next week. That’s about 3,500 to 4,000 of the nation’s flights canceled each day, just a fortnight before Thanksgiving.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office already projects that even if the shutdown ended by next week, it would reduce fourth-quarter GDP by 1.5 percentage points, but this projection only focuses on the reduced economic activity of unpaid federal workers and limited federal outlays. It does not account for holiday travel coming to a halt, either officially, as it will next week, or unofficially, as at least 3% of Friday flights have already been canceled.
SUPREME COURT COULD SAVE TRUMP BY OVERTURNING TARIFFS
Commercial aviation contributes some 5% of the country’s annual economic output. Even if the holiday travel that spans from before Thanksgiving in November until after Christmas in December is a fifth of that, the shutdown could be threatening a full 1% of U.S. GDP without even accounting for the millions of unpaid workers and the rest of the shutdown. Democrats had their fun, used the livelihoods of 2.5 million workers to do so, and ultimately got their little CIA spook in Virginia’s governor’s mansion. Now it’s time to wrap it up before the private sector starts to absorb the costs of Washington’s incompetence.