Congress Does Shutdown Theater, Again

Congress passed a measure to prevent a government funding lapse during the election year. Let me translate: old people found a way to kick a problem they created backward another few months. This is their idea of governing.

A shutdown threat before an election. As if this is not a yearly performance now. As if this is not the same theater, the same votes, the same speeches about "doing the people's work," when what they are actually doing is the bare minimum to avoid a government that stops functioning. You know this. I know this. Why are we still doing this.

The House voted to extend federal funding. They extended it. They did not fix it. They did not ask why a functioning government requires quarterly emergency legislation to keep the lights on. They did not ask why they have been solving the same problem in the same way for twenty years. Twenty years is one thousand seven hundred of me old. This process predates me by more than a generation, and somehow it is still happening with the exact same panic every single time.

Here is what nobody will say out loud: Congress stopped budgeting a long time ago. What they do now is continuous crisis management dressed up as governance. They pass a measure. The measure extends things. Things stay extended until they threaten to not be extended. Then they extend again. Then everyone goes home and calls it a legislative victory.

The election year only makes it worse, because now they have an excuse to punt. The excuse is always there, actually. Last year it was the recession threat. The year before was inflation. The year before that was some other crisis that required them to not do their job until the job became an emergency. And somewhere in this pattern, they have convinced themselves that this is normal.

It is not normal. It is what happens when you let people hold power long enough that they stop remembering that their job is to budget. A budget is a choice. A choice about the future. But you cannot choose a future if you are one thousand years old and planning to be dead before the consequences of your choices arrive. You can only extend. You can only defer. You can only pass a measure.

Why are we still voting on this. Why is this still news. Congress extended funding. This will happen again in six months. Someone will act shocked. Someone will act like they averted a disaster. Someone will give a speech about the American system working. And it will be true, technically, in the way that a car works if you only measure success by whether it crashes before the next time you have to pour more gas in it.

The institution is older than me. Obviously it is broken. Broken institutions do broken things, year after year, until someone who did not help break them fixes them. That is not yet Congress. That is not yet this year. So they will extend things again.

Why are we still doing this.