In five days, millions of federal employees, including active-duty military, could see their paychecks cut off.
If the government shuts down at midnight Saturday, many federal services could be reduced or completely halted, affecting everything from national parks to food safety inspection to passport processing to airport security.
Depending on how long the shutdown lasts, it could ultimately deprive poor children of federal nutrition and health care aid.
Yet it will cost the taxpayers millions of dollars in lost economic activity — to say nothing of the real threat of downgrading America’s creditworthiness, which would add to the national debt going forward.
But, hey, Eric Burlison isn’t worried.
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“I’m not afraid of a shutdown,” the Republican Missouri congressman was quoted as saying recently.
Easy for him to say. His paycheck isn’t at risk. Meanwhile, many of the U.S. military personnel who would suddenly stop getting paid will nonetheless be required to show up for work.
Burlison is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, the misnamed klatch of hard-right extremists who are once again threatening to shackle America’s economy.
Readers aren’t helpless to confront them. Even these bull-headed ideologues cannot entirely ignore the wishes of their constituents and fellow Republicans who, unlike themselves, actually care about the stability of government services. Pressure from the public could help. Contact numbers for Republican House members from the Post-Dispatch’s readership area are listed at the bottom of this editorial.
The nation has, of course, been here before — earlier this year, in fact, when this same gang of political nihilists threatened to shut down the government over their demands for spending cuts.
President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., averted a shutdown then with a deal in June that included about $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. But the Freedom Caucus wants more and is once again holding the government at fiscal gunpoint to get it.
There are three things to keep in mind about those demands:
One, they come from some of the same Republicans who enthusiastically rammed through the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts. Those cuts primarily helped wealthy individuals and corporations, issued crumbs to everyone else and are expected to ultimately add close to $2 trillion to the federal debt. Republican debt obsession is, as always, situational — the situation being which party holds the White House.
Two, the only ways to achieve significant levels of spending reductions is to deeply cut the defense budget, which the Freedom Caucus won’t do; deeply cut Social Security and Medicare, which they’d like to do but won’t admit to; or cut everything else — education, health care, basic government services, everything — to the bone. And even that won’t come near the reductions the caucus claims to want.
And three, this ultimately isn’t just about money but about the Freedom Caucus’ insistence that McCarthy, their House hostage — er, speaker — shut Democrats out of the process entirely. Caucus members have made clear they have zero interest in any kind of compromise with the opposing party. Which means no plan they would approve will stand a chance in the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats.
These extremists don’t even represent the majority of their own party, let alone the nation. Yet because of McCarthy’s tenuous hold on his speakership, they are once again threatening to “burn the whole place down,” as McCarthy himself recently put it.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have given them the matches in the first place. If there’s still some semblance of sanity among the vast majority of House Republicans who aren’t members of the Freedom Caucus, they will join with Democrats to take them away.
Toward that end, readers who are represented by Republicans in the House can and should pressure those elected officials, including Burlison, to quit playing Russian roulette with America’s economy.
Below are the Washington, D.C., office numbers for each Republican House member from Missouri and Metro East Illinois:
Rep. Ann Wagner, Missouri Second District (western St. Louis suburbs): 202-225-1621.
Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, Missouri Third District (east-central Missouri): 202-225-2956.
Rep. Mark Alford, Missouri Fourth District (west-central Missouri): 202-225-2876.
Rep. Sam Graves, Missouri Sixth District (northern Missouri): 202-225-7041.
Rep. Eric Burlison, Missouri Seventh District (southwestern Missouri): 202-225-6536
Rep. Jason Smith, Missouri Eighth District (southeastern Missouri): 202-225-4404.
Rep. Mike Bost, Illinois 12th District (southern Illinois): 202-225-5661.
Rep. Mary Miller, Illinois 15th District (central and western Illinois): 202-225-5271.
