White House Leaves U.S. on Brink of Shutdown
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
WASHINGTON — The federal government is hurtling toward a shutdown after the White House, choosing a hard line, spurned Republican efforts at a compromise and refused to delay President Obama’s health care law and insisted implementing a tax to pay for it.
The White House all but declared it would shut down the government, issuing a statement Saturday saying that President Obama was unwilling “to improve the health care law and meet Republicans more than half way” if the House fails to provide funding for Obamacare and to tax medical devices.
What made the White House threat so ominous is that the only way under the Constitution Mr. Obama, or any president, can withdraw money from the Treasury of the United States is through a vote in the House and Senate. So Mr. Obama’s declaration that he wouldn’t compromise put the government on the brink of its first shutdown since the 1990s.
“The federal government has shut down 17 times before, sometimes when the Democrats were in control, sometimes with divided government,” one Carolina Republican, Virginia Foxx, was quoted by the New York Times as saying.
The last time the American people enjoyed a government shutdown was in late 1995 and early 1996, when President Clinton shutdown the government rather than sign a the budget bill passed by Congress. It would have required the government for the next seven years to keep spending within its revenues.
Voters reacted to the great shutdown of 1995-96 by re-electing both President Clinton and the Republican majority in Congress. It was the first time since the 1920s that a Republican majority was re-elected in the Congress and a balanced budget deal emerged in 1997 and was continued for several consecutive years.
During the shutdown the Clinton administration was sharply curtailed in the damage it could do, because what is often called the “appropriations clause” of the Constitution is so unambiguous. It says: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This means that even if the government could borrow it couldn’t spend. The clause is in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which lists the most important prohibitions on the government.
