The Economist Asia - 27.01.2018

The EconomistJanuary 27th 2018 27

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1

I

F YOU want to shutdown a government

as painlessly as possible, do it over a

weekend. The federal government closed

for business at 12.01am on Saturday, Janu-

ary 20th and reopened on Monday night,

after the Senate passed a bill to fund it until

February 8th. This wasthe ninth such shut-

down since 1980. Because the party with

less power in Washington can usually de-

rail the annual budgeting process, it will

not be the last. Familiarity breeds eye-roll-

ing. It is nevertheless remarkable that the

world’s pre-eminent power so frequently

fails to pay for its government on time. And

though the shutdown is over, the disputes

that provoked it remain unresolved, and

look likely to recur in the coming weeks.

Republicans have an inherent advan-

tage in shutdown politics. The party’s ani-

mating philosophy is that government

should be smaller and do less. A closed

government does less. When Democrats

back a shutdown, ashappened this time, it

undercutstheir claim to be the non-crazy

party of governance and regular order.

This bias towards stability can enrage the

party’s left flank, whose members have a

grudging respect for Republican intransi-

gence. After the deal was done, demonstra-

tors chanting “Undocumented, Unafraid”

and “They say get back; We say fight back”

packed the hallway outside the office of

Charles Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in

the Senate.

The blockage was cleared by a face-sav-

press secretary to John Boehner, House

Speaker during the last shutdown in 2013,

notes that “there is a difference between

popularity and intensity. Support for pro-

tecting the DREAMers is high, but support

for shutting down the government to

achieve that goal is low.”

To hold out longer would have carried

particular risks for the ten Democratic sen-

ators up for re-election in states that Mr

Trump won in 2016. Voters in five of those

states received robocalls accusingtheir

senators of having “prioritised illegal im-

migrants over American citizens”. The lon-

ger the shutdown battle continued, the

more it would have deepened the fissure

between elected Democrats from safe

seats and those at greater risk—and, per-

haps more important, between the party’s

activist wing and the centrist voters it

needs to take the Senate. As it is, the shut-

down’s brevity and the lunatic speed of

news in the Trump era means it will prob-

ably be forgotten by November when the

mid-term elections roll round.

Maine-stream

And yet despite all the energy of cam-

paigners, the fraught negotiations, the pos-

turing and the welcome emergence of a

moderate caucus, huddled in the office of

Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Congress

is not much closer to fixing the status of the

DREAMers, which should be the easiest of

immigration questions to resolve. The Re-

publican stance on immigration seems to

be hardening. Mr Trump at first urged legis-

lators to craft a bipartisan “bill of love”,

which he would sign. Lindsay Graham

and Dick Durbin, Republican and Demo-

cratic senators respectively, came up with a

bill that givesDREAMers a path to citizen-

ship, funds some of Mr Trump’s border

wall (his insistence that Mexico will pay for

it seems to have evanesced) and eliminates

ing manoeuvre. Democrats agreed to

reopen the government without getting

their chief demand—a legislative fix for De-

ferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

(DACA), Barack Obama’s executive order

that shielded from deportation about

800,000 undocumented immigrants

brought to America as children, which

President Donald Trump cancelled last

September. Republicans, for their part,

loaded up the reopening bill with six years

of funding for the Children’s Health Insur-

ance Programme, which provides health

insurance to poor children. Mitch McCon-

nell, the Senate majority leader, suggested

he would bring a DACAbill up for a vote

before February 8th.

Mindful of future primaries, and of the

more than a million people who took to

the streets in the Women’s March two days

earlier to protest against Mr Trump, Demo-

cratic senators with presidential aspira-

tions voted no. Ben Wikler of MoveOn, a

pressure group allied with the Democrats,

says that once the party had made the deci-

sion to stand and fight, the best thing to do

would have been to “make your case to the

public...Democrats and pro-DREAMers [as

DACArecipients are known] have a win-

ning argument to make.” Polls back Mr

Wikler’s claim. Majorities in both parties

believe thatDREAMers, who are American

in all but paperwork, should be allowed to

stay, either as citizens or as permanent legal

residents. But Michael Steel, who was

Shutdown politics

Power off

WASHINGTON, DC

The brief government closure revealed deep splits among Democrats and an

increasingly poisonous debate over immigration

United States

Also in this section

28 Federal budgeting is busted

29 Stopping the supply of fentanyl

29 Gerrymandering in Pennsylvania

30 Dollar General

31 Race and horses

32 Lexington: Salting the earth

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