The two sides could mirror the mid-1990s shutdown, agreeing to a temporary stop-gap resolution only to shut down the government for a longer period time, said Bryan Marshall, Miami University professor and assistant chair of the political science department.
“It has a good chance to last as long as the 1995-1996 shutdown,” he said. “I think eventually cooler heads will prevail, but it might take some time for those cooler heads to prevail.”
But Marshall and other political experts say this shutdown is a real threat to a weaker economy because of the looming debt limit battle — a factor that did not plague the Congress nearly two decades ago. And the Republicans and Democrats today are far more polarized than their counterparts in the mid-1990s.
“I think both sides should shoulder a good deal of the blame here from just a purely civic perspective. To me, it just looks like bad government,” said Mark Caleb Smith, director of Cedarville University’s Center for Political Studies.
“Do you see a statesman? I don’t see a statesman,” he said.
The first partial shutdown in the winter of 1995 lasted less than a week, running from Nov. 14-19, 1995. That led to the furlough of about 800,000 federal employees — the same number currently affected by the shutdown, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan arm of the Library of Congress.
Government reopened as Congress, mostly led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and President Bill Clinton attempted to hammer out a deal. But negotiations failed and government partially closed for three weeks, from Dec. 16, 1995, to Jan. 6. 1996. Some appropriations were approved after the November shutdown so the number of federal workers furloughed the second time was about 284,000, according to the 1999 CRS report. Another 475,000 “essential” federal employees worked without pay.
Greg Jolivette, who was campaigning to return to Hamilton City Council at the last federal government shutdown, doesn’t recall it having much of an effect “other than from a planning standpoint.”
“If there was (federal) money to be delivered, it would be delayed,” he said.
The thought of the day, Jolivette said, was the shutdown would be short-lived “and we’ll be back to business as usual.”
“That might not be the case with this, but I guess time will tell,” Jolivette said. “But no one’s blinked yet.”
U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot and U.S. Sen. Rob Portman represented most of Southwest Ohio the last time the government was shut down and are still serving in Washington.
Former U.S. Rep. Tony Hall, a Democrat who represented Ohio’s 3rd Congressional District from 1979 to 2002, said his friends in Congress see no clear path out of the current mess because of an unwillingness to compromise. He said the two political parties have always had their differences, but he saw more bipartisanship during his years in Congress and in the wake of the last shutdown.
“We said we would never let this happen again. Our job was to keep this government running,” said Hall. “Most of those people — and I count myself as bipartisan — are not there anymore. They have a whole bunch of people who are very extreme.”
The last shutdown occurred with Republicans having a majority in the House and Senate. There was no Affordable Care Act at issue. Instead, the shutdown grew out of more traditional battles over the budget and debt reduction — both of which remain points of contention.
In the end, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., defied his House counterparts led by Gingrich and spearheaded a Senate vote to reopen government. The House went along, having received assurances from Clinton that he would work with them on debt reduction.
Scott Nein had just joined the Ohio Senate in July 1995 and does not recall any local impact on Butler County.
“Unless you were a federal worker or someone that was receiving a check, retiree or a veteran or someone on some sort of government subsidy, there was a good chance you would not have felt it,” said Nein, who was in the Ohio House prior to joining the state senate.
Nein said he is “surprised” there hasn’t been another shutdown before now.
“States are not allowed to run a deficit, and the federal government shouldn’t either, unless it’s a time of war,” he said. “But that may just be the conservative in me.”
Nein, who is currently a registered lobbyist in Columbus, said communities that would have felt the impact would be ones with federal parks or installations, like at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton.
And the impact now, as it was then, is really only felt by those who worked at military facilities like Wright-Patt, or those wanting to visit a federal park or museum, or to apply for a passport or Social Security.
But as the second mid-1990s shutdown dragged on, agencies began running out of reserves. During the first week of January 1996 federal court officials warned that within a week judges would be unable to conduct jury trials and indictments might be dismissed under speedy trial rules, according to this newspaper’s archives.
That same week, the government said Meals on Wheels programs serving 600,000 elderly people were nearly out of money, 11 states had drained funds to administer unemployment insurance and renewal of housing vouchers for poor families was at risk.
In the court of public opinion Republicans took the bulk of the blame. They lost seats in Congress during the next election and watched Clinton be re-elected and take credit for a debt reduction plan that helped give the U.S. budget surpluses that lasted until after he left office in 2001.
Marshall said the confidence of the Republican Party in the 104th Congress came from Gingrich as he was attributed to bringing the GOP “in from the wilderness.”
“They came in with significant numbers and came in with over 50 freshman Republicans in the House, and there was a lot of personal loyalty to Newt Gingrich,” Marshall said.
But Gingrich had more influence than Boehner does now, he said, and the new Republican Congressmen don’t feel as beholden to Boehner as they did to Gingrich.
“The members are from districts that they carried pretty easily,” Marshall said. “The new Republican members, they don’t have the appreciation to what it was like to be in the minority (as they did in the mid-1990s).”
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