Was this the “shutdown to end all shutdowns”? That’s how the question is put in the New York Times dispatch on the idea of anti-shutdown legislation percolating in the Congress in the wake of the 35-day standoff between the Congress and the president that idled hundreds of thousands of government employees. The idea now seems to be legislation to prohibit such disruptions.

What a constitutional tautology. The Congress seems to be talking about making it illegal to do what it just did. This wouldn’t be so bizarre hadn’t the solons spent the past month blaming the shutdown on President Trump. Now they want not only to take the blame the president made clear he was happy to shoulder but to punish themselves in the process. How the Founders must be laughing.

Or crying. That’s because of Article 1, Section 9, in which certain prohibitions are laid on the Congress and the rest of the government. It says that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” There’s no more basic slab of American bedrock. We think of it as part of what historian Myron Magnet calls the “lost Constitution.”

“Shutting down the government should be as off limits in budget negotiations as chemical warfare is in real warfare,” the Times quotes Senator Lamar Alexander as explaining. That has to be the first time the constitutional appropriation process has been likened to mustard gas. The Times reports that Mr. Alexander is not alone in expressing such sentiments.

Members of both parties, the Times reports, reckon it’s “past time to enact legislation that would essentially mean the government would remain open at existing spending levels when an impasse such as the fight over the border wall was reached, rather than shuttering parts or all of the government.” That is something, the Times adds, “virtually everyone agrees is costly, unnecessary and even embarrassing.”

The Sun, for one, dissents. Senator Lisa Murkowski may insist, as the Times quotes her as saying, that the shutdown “never should have happened.” Then again also, too, the Congress seems to have disagreed, since it could have pre-empted the shutdown by funding the government and overriding any presidential veto to the contrary. Or just building the blasted wall for which the voters asked.

The Times is trying to palm off on its noble readers the notion that “veterans of past shutdowns have come to learn that there are few, if any, winners” and that “closing the government has not proved effective as a negotiating strategy.” The House’s decision to shut the government, though, has Mrs. Pelosi riding around like Julius Caesar for having stopped the Wall in Mr. Trump’s tracks.

A scheme to deny future Congresses their constitutional authority to use their power has been nursed for some years by Senator Portman, the Times reports. Senator Mark Warner, whose constituents in Virginia include so many living off the government, names his own bill the Stop Shutdowns Transferring Unnecessary Pain and Inflicting Damage in the Coming Years., or the Stop Stupidity Act.

What an odd name for a measure that would cut a blank check for government employees but exclude protection for those elected by actual voters. The Warner plan would cut off pay for legislative and White House officials. Yet the Constitution prohibits diminishing a president’s and a congress’s pay during their terms. Even President Obama’s Justice Department deemed the idea “blatantly unconstitutional.”

All this anti-shutdown legislation is part of what the Sun calls the constitutional mockery movement. Into its serried ranks are filing scores of officers and employees who have sworn to support a Constitution they haven’t thought about or secretly abhor. Rarely, though, have we seen such a mockery as a Congress denying itself the power to shut down, on occasion, a runaway government.