| Congress’s job is to fund the government in the fall, at the start of each fiscal year. (The debate often runs into the winter, which is where we find ourselves now.) Eventually, these spending bills have to pass or the government shuts down. The high stakes make the bills magnets for lawmakers to unrelated amendments that often benefit special interest groups. Past shutdown showdowns have been over everything from funding for Planned Parenthood to a border wall. This time, Musk and Trump took aim at letting Democrats get some of their priorities through. “Because these bills are seen as ‘must pass,’” said Molly Reynolds, a budget expert at the Brookings Institution, “they end up bearing more of Congress’s political conflict.” She said that’s especially true in our current era of heightened partisanship and polarization. Some view a government shutdown as a good thing to do politically The past few shutdowns or shutdown threats have been led by a group of far-right Republicans refusing to vote to pass spending bills. In 2018, there was even a shutdown despite the fact Trump and Republicans controlled all of Washington. This time, Trump and his allies are encouraging a shutdown in the final days of President Joe Biden’s term, before Trump takes office. “I’m all in,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) said on social media this week about the prospect of a shutdown. “There is no plan,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina) told the Hill’s Emily Brooks. “Trump wants the thing to shut down.” “Not every shutdown in modern times has been caused by Republicans,” said Matthew Green, a professor of politics at Catholic University and co-author of a book about Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who was at the center of a famous government shutdown in the ’90s, “but most of them have.” He added: “The Republicans have a number of members who feel the only way to get something from the other party is to use or threaten shutdowns.” Bipartisanship gets punished Often, the only way to fund the government is for Democrats and Republicans to work together. But especially on the right, there’s strong resistance to that. Last year, the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, worked with Democrats to fund the government rather than have a shutdown when members of his party couldn’t unilaterally agree on how to spend money. He lost his job after that. This time, House Republicans and Democrats were working together on a three-month spending bill expected to pass this week. But Musk and Trump opposed the legislation as essentially a giveaway to Democrats. It’s not just Republicans. Many Democrats — who actually agree with Trump that Congress should get rid of the debt ceiling law — seem hesitant to do it when it could help Trump, points out Michael Strain, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “I have been listening for over a decade to Democrats saying they don’t think there should be a debt ceiling,” he said. “And now President-elect Donald Trump is agreeing to that.” | 
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