A few weeks after the government shutdown, you'd be hard pressed to find many who even recall what the shutdown was about.
Few likely remember why the Senate and House of Representatives continued to dig in their heels over the re-opening of the Federal Government. For a time, it even seemed that the current manufactured crisis, the government shutdown, would not be solved before the next manufactured crisis, the raising of the debt ceiling, raised its head.
Virtually everyone in Congress, both Democrat and Republican, believed, and rightly so, that not raising the debt limit would have had cataclysmic effects upon the US and global economy. This excluded only a few freshman members of the House of Representatives as well as a handful of Senators, such as house member Ted Yoho (Fla).
Jacob Lew, Secretary of the Treasury, even said that he had done everything "prudent and legal" that he could to prevent a default, and that unless the ceiling was raised, the United States government would default for the first time in its history.
Who is to blame for bringing us to the edge of a catastrophe of this magnitude? According to a recent poll done by the Wall Street Journal, it seems that the blame is falling mostly on the Republican Party: 70 percent of the country said that Republicans were putting politics above what was best for the country.
A lesser but still high 51 percent said the same about President Barack Obama. When it comes to the shutdown, the polling is almost as bad. Americans polled blamed Republicans over Democrats for the shutdown by a 22 percent margin (53 to 31).
Will this have any effect on the 2014 elections? It's hard to say. American politics and especially polarized American politics are very hard to predict. However, I know what you may be asking is if the consequences of the shutdown and default are so horrendous, why aren't clean debt limit bills passed? That, unfortunately, can be blamed on a variety of factors.
The first and probably the most important factor is that there is now no pressure on Congress. While both parties' political ratings have been lowered, we now come to one of the biggest paradoxes in politics. The approval ratings of Congress itself is very low regardless of party affiliation, but the approval ratings of individual congressmen and women their constituents are still relatively high. This leads to little political pressure on members of Congress to actually compromise.
The other reason that there has been little will to compromise is that there are a few members of the House and Senate who aren't convinced that the default is really all that bad. They are dead wrong of course; however, when the chairman of the House Rules Committee articulated his position as quote, "Look. We're not French. We don't surrender," room for compromise can be hard to find.
- Weber is a sophomore from Fort Wayne, Ind. majoring in political science and history.
