2013 United States federal government shutdown

The Republican-led House of Representatives, encouraged by Ted Cruz[4][5] and a handful of other Republican senators,[6] and conservative groups such as Heritage Action,[7][8][9] offered several continuing resolutions with language delaying or defunding the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as "Obamacare").

The tensions that would ultimately produce the 2013 shutdown began to take shape after Republicans, strengthened by the emergence of the Tea Party, won back a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives from the Democrats in 2010.

"[25][26] Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, then running for office as the Republican Party's nominee, said that although a shutdown would be frustrating for many and an inconvenience, it might be absolutely necessary to make it politically possible to restructure federal spending.

[40][41] In January 2013, Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas wrote that "it may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal well being of our country, rather than plod along the path of Greece, Italy and Spain.

[49][51][52] The New York Daily News wrote that it was Meadows' letter that had put the federal government on the road to shutdown,[53] noting that calls to defund the Affordable Care Act through spending bills languished until Meadows wrote an open letter on August 21, 2013, to House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor asking them to defund the Affordable Care Act in any appropriations bills brought to the House floor.

[52] Joshua Withrow of the Tea Party group FreedomWorks, which had endorsed the Meese coalition's plan months earlier,[45] explained the overall strategy, writing in August 2013 that the continuing resolution due to expire September 30 "must be renewed in order for the doors to stay open in Washington.

[44] The fund also ran radio ads against Republican Senators for not joining the effort to defund the Affordable Care Act, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, and Thad Cochran of Mississippi.

"[67] Some Republicans began to re-frame the shutdown battle in purely political rather than policy terms, with Indiana representative Marlin Stutzman telling the conservative Washington Examiner on October 1, "We have to get something out of this.

[88] Over the next week, House Republicans continued this strategy with piecemeal bills for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

[105] Yalman Onaran of Bloomberg News wrote that the government's failure to raise the debt ceiling and pay its debt would "halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression", noting that a government default would be 23 times larger than the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy during the Great Recession.

Republican Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, in favor of a clean CR, said Congress should have passed a bill to fund the government without policy strings attached weeks earlier.

[119] Note: All the House Democrats voted for the compromise Many Republicans criticized the bill, with Ted Cruz calling it a "terrible deal" and Kentucky's Thomas Massie describing it as a "goose egg" for their party.

[120] McConnell, who was praised afterwards by some Democrats for his bipartisanship,[120] defended himself from conservative critics, saying House failures had put him in a weak position and that the effort to defund the ACA through a shutdown was "not a smart play" and had "diverted our attention away from what was achievable".

The Yurok tribe of Northern California, which relies almost exclusively on federal funds, furloughed 60 out of its 310 employees, closed its child care center, and cut off emergency financial assistance to the poor and elderly.

In Minnesota, the Red Lake Band of Chippewa were supposed to receive $1 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help operate their government, but were not given access to the money before the shutdown and were forced to halt all non-emergency medical procedures.

The White Buffalo Calf Woman Society,[145] a domestic violence shelter that serves the Rosebud Indian Reservation and surrounding communities in South Dakota, lost 90% of its funding due to the shutdown and was forced to turn victims away.

[149] A bill introduced by Republican Darrell Issa of California and passed by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee would allow the District to spend its own local revenues independent of Congress.

[90] On October 9, D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray confronted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and asked him to consider supporting the House bill which passed a day earlier, arguing that D.C. should be able to "spend [its] own money".

[153][154] The District of Columbia Superior Court, which is operated by the federal government, remains largely open during a shutdown but will delay payments to witnesses, jurors, court-appointed lawyers, language interpreters and others until after appropriations are restored.

[158] The shutdown also interfered with the Prison Rape Elimination Act-mandated reporting of incidents of sexual abuse and assault in immigration centers, of which there were 215 allegations from October 2009 through March 2013[159] according to the Government Accountability Office.

During the federal government shutdown, the Office of Civil Rights, a unit at the Department of Education responsible for handling sexual assault cases on college campuses ceased investigating claims of Title IX and Clery Act violations.

[171] On October 4, the White House announced that Obama's trip to Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, where he was scheduled to attend the 2013 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Bali, would be cancelled due to the government shutdown.

According to Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, while the Obama administration was willing to accept this significantly lower level of spending, it felt that a new demand by House Republicans to delay or defund the Act represented "nothing less than an effort to use the threat of a financial crisis to nullify the results of the last election."

Klein continued: "As the White House sees it, Speaker John Boehner has begun playing politics as game of Calvinball, in which Republicans invent new rules on the fly and then demand the media and the Democrats accept them as reality and find a way to work around them."

"[197][198] Later, during the shutdown, Sanders would return to the theme of financial influence, saying "Right now, as we speak, in the House of Representatives there are people who are being threatened that if they vote for a clean CR [continuing resolution to reopen the government] that huge sums of money will be spent against them in the next election.

[203] Tea Party members responded: Cruz blamed the failure to get meaningful concessions from Democrats on moderate Senate Republicans for refusing to back their colleagues in the House, the Senate Conservatives Fund began sending out emails attacking McConnell for his role in ending the shutdown, and Sarah Palin suggested high-ranking moderate Republicans who voted in favor of the final bill would be targeted by Tea Party members in primary challenges.

Representative Peter King suggested this in-fighting was aiding Democrats, and has led to questions over whether "friendly fire" could jeopardize Republican chances of winning the Senate and maintaining control over the House.

For example, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey in September 2013 found that approximately 43% of Americans opposed the health care reform law while 39% viewed it favorably, numbers largely unchanged since 2011.

[183] Richard Seamon, a law professor at the University of Idaho and former assistant solicitor general, told the Christian Science Monitor that the NPS risked vandalism, crime and legal liability if it left its properties open to the public during the shutdown.

[268][276] David McCumber, the Washington bureau chief of Hearst Newspapers, said Neugebauer had shown "staggering hypocrisy" in attacking a ranger for enforcing the closure the congressman had helped create.