PolitiFact: Despite Gingrich’s claim, shutdowns are not ‘normal’

Recently on CNN’s “Crossfire,” where Gingrich is now a host, he drew on this experience to put the current shutdown into historical context.

“Tonight there is an amazing amount of hysteria and vitriol over what is a normal part of the constitutional process,” Gingrich said Sept. 30. “The government shut down 12 times under Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill. It was only shut down twice while I was speaker.”

The U.S. government was shut down 12 times when O’Neill was speaker and Ronald Reagan was president? We didn’t remember that.

But we did remember shutdowns under Gingrich, and we wouldn’t classify them as a “normal part of the constitutional process.”

The numbers

What causes a shutdown is fairly simple: It happens when appropriations bills expire and Congress and the president can’t agree on new ones.

Shutdowns have a constitutional basis, from Article I, Section 9, which says, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This has been reinforced by the Antideficiency Act, which provides exceptions only for “emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property.”

We found a list of shutdowns dating to 1976 in a report from the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress.

Gingrich was right on the numbers: O’Neill served as speaker from January 1977 to January 1987, when 12 of the 17 shutdowns occurred. Two came during Gingrich’s tenure. (One each occurred under Speakers Carl Albert, Jim Wright and Tom Foley.)

Still, we found a lot of context that was at odds with Gingrich’s implication that all those shutdowns were similar or that they were a “normal” part of governance.

A fair comparison?

Gingrich equated the shutdowns under O’Neill with those during his own tenure. But we found significant differences in the nature of hte shutdowns and the reasons they happened. Here’s why:

Five of the shutdowns under O’Neill happened before 1980, when new legal opinions changed how shutdowns happened. Before 1980, many federal agencies continued to operate during funding gaps, assuming that money would be restored soon and that Congress didn’t intend for them to close down.

But in 1980 and 1981, then-Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued two opinions that required agency heads to suspend operations until funding was restored.

The only activities that could go forward, Civiletti wrote, were those where there is a connection “between the function to be performed and the safety of human life or the protection of property,” or where otherwise “authorized by law.”

So it’s not really accurate to equate the first five episodes under O’Neill to either of the Gingrich-era shutdowns, or, for that matter, to the current one. The first five shutdowns under O’Neill were hardly apocalyptic events in which hundreds of thousands of federal workers were forced to stay home.

By contrast, in the second and longer of the shutdowns under Gingrich, roughly 280,000 executive branch employees were furloughed, government contractors were laid off and government services were delayed, the CRS noted.

Of the seven O’Neill-era shutdowns after the Civiletti memos, the longest lasted three days, and the total duration for all of them was 13 days. The cumulative length of the two Gingrich shutdowns was 26 days.

The Gingrich-era shutdown was led by small-government Republicans who wanted to aggressively cut back the scope of government. The current one was sparked by the imminent implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

By contrast, the seven later shutdowns under O’Neill seemed to be dominated by more run-of-the-mill budgetary horse-trading on items such as raises for civil servans, a ban on oil and gas leasing in federal animal refuges, and the sale of the freight railroad Conrail.

What the experts say

Donald Wolfensberger, a former Republican staff director of the House Rules Committee, said Gingrich has a point. “It’s not the duration that matters so much as the disruption, inconvenience and appearance of dysfunction from closing government doors and shooing federal workers away from their jobs,” said Wolfensberger, a congressional scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Other experts, however, found fault with Gingrich’s comparison. For example, Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, called it “an apples and oranges comparison.”

Several of our experts also cast doubt on whether any of the shutdowns were a normal part of the constitutional process.

Roy T. Meyers, a political scientist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, said that “the normal situation throughout our history has been for agencies to be funded through appropriations bills, not closed because of the lack of such bills.”

“It is hard to imagine how the preamble’s charge to ‘promote the general welfare’ is met by this shutdown,” Meyers said.

Our rating

Gingrich said shutdowns are “a normal part of the constitutional process,” with 12 shutdowns under Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill and two during his own speakership.

He’s right on the number, but the shutdowns under O’Neill were quite different in nature than either of the ones under Gingrich or the current one. It’s also dubious to suggest that shutdowns are part of the normal constitutional process. We rate Gingrich’s claim Half True.