If Congress is unable to meet a September 30 deadline to fund the federal government, a shutdown could bring much of Washington to a halt. The last government shutdown, from December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019, lasted 35 days and was the longest in four decades.
While government shutdowns have become less common in recent decades — there have been six since 1990 — an increasingly partisan Washington has left Congress unable to resolve sticking points on spending for longer periods of time.
With Speaker Kevin McCarthy overseeing one of the narrowest and most factitious congressional majorities in decades, there’s no telling how long a government shutdown this year could last.
Pretty much everything wrong in US politics today can be traced back to either Nixon or Reagan. Nixon fucked human rights, while Reagan fucked the economy (and provided a convenient excuse/lie for removing programs that benefit the poor and minorities).
While you’re not wrong, you can’t underestimate Grover Norquist’s influence. He was never elected to anything, but the party’s intense hatred of any taxes whatsoever comes directly from him. Reagan may have inspired him, but he took it all to another level.
I can blame the fucked up basic structure of the government on the founders.
I mean yeah, it has plenty of issues, although for the time it was created it was actually pretty good. If you were setting up a government from scratch today you’d obviously do a ton of things different, but there’s also a few centuries of learning between when the US was founded and now. That said what is there mostly worked up until now aside from a couple rough patches (looking at you 1850s and 1860s). It looked like things were starting to head in the right direction at least and then Nixon decided to throw a wrench in things with his southern strategy, and Republicans have been fighting tooth and nail to drag us backwards ever since.