Plan B for resolving the government shutdown

Another day with no sign of a resolution to the government shutdown, just wrenching stories of federal workers going to food banks, while the President calls 50,000 back to work, expecting them to work without pay.

A White House meeting of the protagonists today was simply another venue for reiterating each side’s sticking points: $5.7 billion for “the wall” in exchange for reopening the government versus reopening the government in exchange for “negotiating” measures to increase border security.

Like the budget sequestration in 2013, what was unthinkable is becoming a new equilibrium, where we’re seeing 800,000 people being furloughed as normal. Except that isn’t normal.

Our political leaders are impervious to the inhumanity of this shutdown.

Yesterday, I suggested an intervention to resolve the impasse, with a respected religious leader as mediator. Bring the President, Vice President, and the four Senate and House leaders to an isolated location, take their phones and internet access, and have them talk and listen until they agree on a reasonable solution.

Wishful thinking. This power structure has no motivation to find common ground, each seeing the conflict as zero sum. You win or you lose.

Plan B

We need a forcing function.

Set a deadline, perhaps a week or so for the impasse to be resolved and the government reopened. If the President and Congress don’t make the deadline, the air traffic controllers and TSA agents go out on strike. No planes in the air— not since 9/11.

The message to our elected leaders: if you won’t do your job, we can’t do ours. If we’re not being paid, it’s not fair to ask us to work, it’s not fair to ask us to defer our bills and sacrifice our credit ratings, it’s not fair to ask us to find part-time jobs and sell possessions to raise money, it’s not fair to ask us to rely on our neighbors’ charity to eat. It’s not fair to ask us to sacrifice for such a simplistic dispute.

I’ll join them picketing. Our government is failing us.