When asked about the standoff at a press breakfast on November 15, Gingrich complained about something seemingly unrelated. Where is their sense of courtesy? Polls showed that Americans blamed Congressional Republicans more than Clinton for the standoff.
Overall, these shutdowns were a political victory for Clinton. When the new continuing resolution that had been agreed to in November expired on December 15, the government shut down again. Over the following twenty-two days White House and Congressional negotiators struggled to hammer out an agreement over the budget, with the end result that, by January the President and Congress agreed to a seven year balanced budget plan that included modest spending cuts and tax increases.
Politically speaking, President Clinton got the better of the government shutdown. Whereas Gingrich expected the public to side with the Republican Party during the dispute, opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans felt that the impasse had been the result of Republican obstinacy.
Today, with the GOP in control of both houses of Congress as well as the presidency, polling indicates Republicans will again receive the blame should the government shut down. We were construing it narrowly.
Then you really have to figure out how to do the least damage. You know, the Department of Agriculture has all these greenhouses or whatever. There are just some things that are very hard to turn off. Those things have to be kept going. But then, mostly, we just sent everybody home. One decision I had to make was what about the national Christmas tree.
It was December by this time, and were we going to have the national Christmas tree or not? You had to have some police down there, some guards. The Park Service has to have their people down there. So what were we going to do about that? And some other company volunteered security guards.
So I kept the lights on the Christmas tree, which might have been the wrong political decision. It might have been better to turn them off. Q: What do you recall about the dynamics of those meetings? Did you ever get the sense that the President was second-guessing whether this was the right thing to do? Rivlin: It was a very odd time. I found the Administration position very hard to defend because I thought that we should be moving further in the direction of budget balance.
I remember there were two of us on one side of the table and four of them. You make this presentation. In , the House of Representatives and the Senate fought over whether Medicaid should be used to pay for abortions.
That led to three separate instances in which the government could not provide funding for the Departments of Labor and Health, Education and Welfare. The shutdowns added up to a total of 28 days that year. Another gap in funding the following year, when President Jimmy Carter took issue with a costly public works bill and defense spending, lasted 17 days. Two legal opinions issued by the United States attorney general, Benjamin R.
Civiletti, in and , made shutdowns much more severe. But Mr. Civiletti argued that it was illegal for the government to spend money without congressional appropriations. The few exceptions included work by federal employees to protect life and property, he wrote.
That, in turn, prompted an increased frequency of small shutdowns as politicians struggled with deadlines, said Roy T.
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