Well, it
happened.
After months of fighting and stubbornness, the deadline for
the spending bill came and went as Congress continued to bicker about the
Affordable Care Act.
As I sat in the newsroom of my university on Monday night,
I kept glancing at the clock and checking Twitter and various news sources for
updates as the time inched toward midnight. By 11 p.m., the situation seemed
hopeless and a shutdown inevitable.
My fellow editors and a Student Union member gathered around
a computer screen at 11:55 p.m. and waited patiently for news of the shutdown.
When Rep. Louise Slaughter
was recognized and announced "The great government of
the United States is now closed," we all cheered.
Now, before you start sneering at me and
making snide comments about "You stupid, ignorant, self-centered, out of
touch millennials," please listen to why we cheered.
We have watched over and over again as our
government has become more and more fractured. There is no room for compromise.
Everyone stubbornly sticks to their own views and blocks out anyone
who tries to challenge those views. The majority of my
generation is sick and tried of a government that chooses to be blind and stubborn
to the point of destroying the very thing they were elected to protect. It was
time for something drastic to happen that would force the parties to
work together in order to reopen the government.
The ironic thing about the whole situation
is that the very thing Congress was fighting about,
the Affordable Care Act, opened registration to the American people
at midnight right after the shutdown of
the government was announced.
Republicans have been saying over and over
that the American people do not want the Affordable Care Act and have used this as ammunition in their long winded arguments and ridiculous filibusters. But the
website for registration into the program crashed because the servers
could not handle the amount of people applying.
I am sensing a bit of a contradiction here...
Reuters estimated that the page got more
than 10 million views and that some people waited hours to fill out the short
application, while others resolved to wait for a later date.
President
Obama responded to the technical issues saying, "We
found out that there have been times this morning where the site has been
running more slowly than it normally will. The reason is because more than one
million people visited healthcare.gov before 7:00 in the morning."
To borrow the phrase from the very cleverly worded article
about the shutdown by Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas of the Washington Post, the
American people's most pressing concern seems to be the buggy Congress.
So where do we go from here?
It
has been two days since the shutdown was announced and there seem to be no
definitive answers. To make everything even more interesting,
now everyone in Congress who was so concerned about
the Affordable Care Act have pushed that battle to the side in favor
of getting the government up and running again.
How embarrassing for
the American people that their government can not work together to run what is
arguably the most powerful and affluent nation in the world. What does it say
about our effectiveness as a nation when our lawmakers stubbornly hold
to their partisan ideals and hold the government hostage? How are any
members of Congress (Who are still getting paid might I remind you!!) going to
be able to look into the eyes of the roughly 2 million Americans whose
paychecks are being delayed and the 800,000 who may never see their hard earned
wages and say with conviction that there was a real reason for Congress
members' stubbornness and selfishness?
There
are going to be a lot of questions in the coming days and the actions of our
government could change the face of the nation forever. So stay informed, stay
updated and hold on to your hats. It's going to be a wild ride.
Information
for this piece was taken from Wonkbook:
This is what the Republicans were afraid of and The
nine most painful impacts of a government shutdown
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