For newer members of Congress, the partial federal government shutdown represents unseen levels of dysfunction in the nation’s capital.
The same goes for those who have been around long enough to remember the last one.
There are four members of Georgia’s congressional delegation who were in office during the icy winter of 1995-96, when a pair of shutdowns lasted a total of 28 days and one of Georgia’s own — then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich — was leading the Republican charge.
Gingrich and President Bill Clinton had their disagreements, but at least they were talking. Now in the midst of the first shutdown in nearly 18 years, most of the talking has been through the news media with no visible signs pointing to a resolution.
Republicans say the new health care law must be a part of the discussion, and President Barack Obama and Democrats say they won’t come to the table until the shutdown ends and a plan is in place to avert a default.
“This is a historic event of first impression,” said U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, an Albany Democrat first elected in 1992. “It has never been this bad.”
The 1995 shutdowns were clashes over long-term budget plans as federal government spending expired. The standoff was resolved when Clinton agreed to balance the budget within seven years. As it turned out, an economic boom helped balance the budget by 1998.
This year’s confrontation was not one House Speaker John Boehner sought out, but the most conservative members of his GOP caucus wanted to derail the law known as Obamacare. Democrats have opposed any efforts to strip funding for the law, delay it or eliminate parts of it in a short-term spending bill, and the partial shutdown began Oct. 1.
“Newt was an individual who believed very strongly that shutting down the government was the right thing to do and keeping it shut down was the right thing to do,” said Georgia Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who was a House freshman in 1995.
“And that was obviously a very (different) opinion from what the White House had and what other members on the other side of the aisle had, so it was partisan from that standpoint,” Chambliss said. “But the overall atmosphere was not as poisonous as it is now. It makes it harder to resolve the thing.”
U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat first elected in 1986, said he had a good rapport with Gingrich because they both represented the Atlanta region. He said there’s a big difference between Gingrich and Boehner.
“I don’t think Newt feared his group,” Lewis said. “Newt didn’t have a tea party.”
The tension between House GOP leadership and its right flank has been an ongoing theme, including when 12 Republicans openly defied Boehner on the House floor in January by voting for someone else for speaker. (U.S. Rep. Paul Broun of Athens voted for former U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Fla.)
But Gingrich had his own troubles with his right-wing members. In 1998 he famously called them "petty dictators" and "the perfectionist caucus" on the House floor when they rebelled against a budget compromise.
Gingrich had the advantage of a GOP-run Senate, as opposed to Harry Reid’s Democratic-controlled upper chamber of today, which has swatted away just about every House GOP bill. But then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole had a more moderate group of Republicans and was running for president against Clinton, which presented its own political fissures as the shutdown wore on.
Gingrich took a major public relations hit when he suggested the shutdown came in part because he was snubbed by Clinton and rode in the back of Air Force One to and from Israel for the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Many political observers said the shutdown aided Clinton's easy re-election victory in 1996.
But Gingrich views the period as a victory for its policy results.
"Ultimately President Clinton and the Republicans in Congress reached agreements which led to cuts in spending, welfare reform, the first tax cuts in 16 years, and the only four consecutive balanced budgets in our lifetime," Gingrich wrote in a Time magazine op-ed last week.
He urged Republicans not to yield now.
“Faced with a president who refuses to negotiate, the House Republicans have to stand firm,” Gingrich wrote. “A collapse of the House Republicans would teach President Obama that he can get away with virtually anything he wants. It would lead to a frightening three years and ultimately an even bigger crisis.”
One big difference in the two shutdowns, said U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Savannah Republican first elected in 1992, is rhetorical. Republicans — including Gingrich — then were more nonchalant about the effects of a shutdown and almost cheered it on.
Heading into this year’s shutdown, Republicans were careful to emphasize that they did not want to shut down the government and they merely wanted to fund everything except the health care law.
“Not everybody agrees that shutting down Ol’ Faithful’s a good thing, even in the Republican base,” Kingston said. “So I think now we’re being a lot more cautious of the sensitivity of it for the people who are affected.”
A more disruptive deadline is approaching quickly, as the government will soon run out of spare cash and need to raise the debt ceiling, another action for which Republicans are seeking concessions — possibly long-term budget savings. Democrats say they are willing to talk about budget reforms, but not up against pressure points that could damage the economy. Republicans say it takes such deadlines to force action.
Kingston said the two parties are more dug in now, in part because of the news media environment.
“If you get back to the rise of talk radio and conservative Fox (News Channel) vs. MSNBC or CNN, you know, people are camped out in their own information silos,” Kingston said.
In 1995, he said, “people hadn’t given up on CNN and mainstream media.”
“Here’s what I’m getting to: In our (conservative) districts, there’s a totally different view of this than there would be in the macro level of the United States,” Kingston said.
Lewis said social media is affecting the shutdown debate because it is making people more informed about what’s going on.
“I’ve heard so many people all over the place saying, ‘You really need to get your act together,’ ” Lewis said. “I didn’t hear that in ‘95. … I could just tell talking to the members, it’s like a dark cloud over the place.”
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