Self-Inflicted Wounds the 2013 Government Shutdown and the Internal Divisions of Congressional Republicans

Self-Inflicted Wounds The 2013 Government Shutdown And The Internal Divisions Of Congressional Republicans Anssi Klemetti Pro Gradu Thesis Contemporary History The University of Turku January 2017 UNIVERSITY OF TURKU Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History and Political Science Faculty of Social Sciences KLEMETTI, ANSSI: Self-Inflicted Wounds. The 2013 Government Shutdown And The Internal Divisions Of Congressional Republicans. Pro Gradu Thesis, 102 pages, 6 annex pages. Contemporary History January 2017 Abstract: The aim of this thesis is to look into the 2013 government shutdown in the United States of America, which lasted from October 1 to October 16, with the purpose of studying the internal divisions that were created or made visible within the Congressional manifestation of the Republican Party. The main sources for the thesis are a pair of shutdown-inducing letters from Mark Meadows and Mike Lee to Congressional leaders, the final tallies of the votes that ended the shutdown, as well as media sources. The initial shutdown-related division was made apparent in the summer of 2013 between the 14 Senators and 80 Representatives supporting through the Meadows and Lee letters a "defunding strategy", which ultimately led to the shutdown, and the 32 Senators and 152 Representatives who opposed using said strategy to combat President Obama's healthcare reform. The final division was between the 18 Senators and 144 Representatives who opposed the final compromise that ended the shutdown and the 27 Senators and 87 Representatives who voted in favor of reopening the government. Republicans who did not sign one of the letters and who voted for the final compromise were more likely to have experience of previous government shutdowns; more likely to have seniority over their colleagues; more likely to be ideologically moderate; less likely to be affiliated with the Tea Party; and more likely to hail from competitive districts or states, while the opposite is true for the Republicans who had signed one of the letters and who opposed the final compromise. While Congressional leaders like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell were largely successful in navigating the crisis, it was the leading defunder Ted Cruz in particular who benefited from the national attention that resulted from the shutdown. While the Tea Party movement was a necessary precondition for elevating politicians such as Cruz, the shutdown crisis should not be understood as an event caused by the Tea Party alone. Keywords: U.S. Congress, government shutdown, Republican party, Tea Party, Obamacare, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mark Meadows, Mike Lee, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. Turun yliopiston laatujärjestelmän mukaisesti tämän julkaisun alkuperäisyys on tarkastettu Turnitin OriginalityCheck -järjestelmällä. TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1. Introduction......................................................................................................................................2 1.1. Questions, sources and prior research...............................................................................5 1.2. The historical and political context of the 2013 government shutdown............................9 1.2.1. Obamacare........................................................................................................10 1.2.2. The rise of the Tea Party movement.................................................................15 1.2.3. Government shutdowns in the United States....................................................21 2. The government shutdown divides Congressional Republicans...................................................26 2.1. Prelude to shutdown: Meadows and Lee letters to Congressional leadership.................27 2.2. Early days: shutdown provokes moderate backlash........................................................32 2.3. The leadership team's difficult balancing act...................................................................35 2.4. Latter days: bickering over the terms of surrender..........................................................38 3. Explaining the divisions.................................................................................................................41 3.1. Seniority and experience of previous shutdowns............................................................43 3.2. The role of the Tea Party..................................................................................................46 3.3. The role of ideology.........................................................................................................48 3.4. The role of district safety for incumbents........................................................................51 4. The aftermath and consequences of the shutdown.........................................................................53 4.1. The shutdown's effect on the Republican Congressional leadership...............................56 4.2. The shutdown's effect on the leading defunders..............................................................62 4.3. The shutdown's effect on the most vocal moderates........................................................68 4.4. The shutdown's effect on the Congressional Tea Party faction.......................................71 5. Self-inflicted wounds.....................................................................................................................73 REFERENCES...................................................................................................................................80 APPENDIX 1 1. Introduction At the stroke of midnight, as October of 2013 began, so too started the first government shutdown for seventeen years in the United States of America. Approximately 850,000 non-essential federal workers were furloughed without pay, and another 1,3 million had to report to work without knowing when they would be paid. All around the country offices were closed and activities ceased. National park entrances were padlocked, food safety inspections were halted and civil litigation in the courts was put on hold. Severe economic damage started accruing as all but the most crucial of government services grinded to a halt.1 Partisan politics were the root cause of this sixteen-day-long crisis. Three and a half years had passed since the Democratic President Barack Obama had signed his healthcare reform, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – or Obamacare2 – into law, but all that time had done nothing to mollify Republican opposition to the law, especially within the party's ultra-conservative Tea Party wing. As the fiscal year of 2013 drew to a close at the end of September, Congressional Republicans moved to use the budget-setting power of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to deprive Obamacare of funding. The aim of this maneuver was to delay by a year the implementation of the law, which otherwise was to finally begin on October the first. The Democrat-controlled Senate, however, voted for a version of this appropriations continuing resolution bill that did not include language defunding Obamacare. With the two houses of Congress so deadlocked, and with no will to compromise on either side, the government shutdown began on October the first.3 The government shutdown crisis was exacerbated by and intertwined with a continuation of another crisis that had to do with the nation's debt ceiling. The debt ceiling, which is a legislative cap on the amount of debt that can be issued by the Treasury, had usually been raised by Congress almost as a matter of routine. Recent years, however, and the summer of 2011 especially, had seen Democrats 1 The New York Times (NYT) 1.10.2013, On Day 1, Parks Close, Workers Stay Home and 'Panda Cam' Goes Dark; The Washington Post 30.9.2013, Absolutely everything you need to know about how the government shutdown will work; Office of Management and Budget 2013, 13. 2 Following a long political tradition of derisive renaming, the Republican opponents of the law started calling it "Obamacare" long before it was even passed. The name was eventually co-opted and embraced by Obama and other Democrats and has thus mostly lost its pejorative nature. In the interest of brevity and without bias the colloquial term Obamacare is therefore mostly used in this thesis. 3 The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) 28.9.2013, GOP Hunts for Budget Plan – As Shutdown Deadline Nears, Senate Strips Health-Law Defunding Pushed by House Conservatives; NYT 30.9.2013, The Battle in Congress On Spending and Debt. 2 and Republicans increasingly at loggerheads over raising the limit. The hard-fought compromise of 2011 had set the debt ceiling at 16,394 trillion Dollars, a level that was reached in January of 2013.4 Careful political maneuvering postponed the crisis for a few months, but by May the Treasury had to once again deploy what is known as "extraordinary measures" to prevent the country from defaulting on its debts. On September 25, just as the nation was preparing itself for the possibility of a government shutdown, the Treasury announced that unless the ceiling were raised, the extraordinary measures would be exhausted by October 17. To follow after that would be the first ever default of the United States of America, the shockwaves of which could, according to the Treasury, trigger a global financial crisis on the scale of the 2008 crisis or worse. With the funding of the government and the raising of the debt ceiling so entwined, by time and politicians'

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