I don’t wish complicated foreign policy problems on the president, but I’m pretty sure that he’s going to be preoccupied with responding to a very unstable situation in the Middle East for the remainder of his first term, not to mention the routine responsibilities of managing Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and also not to mention other possible flare-points, like North Korea, Iran, and whatever else comes up. The upside is that dealing with these crises makes the president look statesmanlike and his opponents petty (if they are focused on things of lesser urgency and importance). That’s why I don’t think things are going to go well for John Boehner and his confederates as they play chicken with the country’s international credit rating and threaten to shut down the government if they don’t get their way.
To be clear, provided the House and Senate can agree to spending bills that they can send to the president for signage, it’s technically the president’s decision to shut down the government by vetoing those spending bills. That’s what happened with Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton. But this time is different. To get a bill to the president’s desk, the Senate must concur with what the House is offering, and there are 53 Democrats in the Senate. So, a more likely fail-point is in the Conference Committee between the House and Senate. They probably will not be able to agree on a Continuing Resolution to keep the government funded. Clinton won the battle with Gingrich by convincing the people that it was the Republicans’ who had shut down the government. That wasn’t really true. Clinton refused to keep the government open at such reduced levels. Obama won’t even need to win that argument. If Congress can’t even send him a bill, then no one can argue that he’s responsible for a government shutdown. That makes this an even easier political battle to win.
Of course, the government cannot remain shut-down for long. The House Republicans will have to cave eventually. It seems Boehner is finding himself in the same place as Gingrich. He can’t convince his freshmen class of political realities and they are insisting on at least trying to drown the government in a bathtub so that they can keep faith with their teabagging supporters.
While Congress proves its dysfunction, expect the president to be dealing with real problems, like what to do about the Navy’s Fifth Fleet being stationed in Bahrain.
