The Longest Shutdown Before The Longest Shutdown
It wasn’t Donald Trump against “Chuck and Nancy”, but Bill Clinton against Newt Gingrich and the Republican House of Representatives. It wasn’t over immigration and border security, but about how to reach the goal of a balanced budget. Until the 2018-19 shutdown, it was the longest government shutdown in history.1
The January 7, 1996 episode of On the Media aired the day after the warring parties agreed to reopen the government after 21 days. And that shutdown had come just a month after a five day shutdown. Parks and agencies were closed and workers furloughed.2
During the show’s second hour, host Alex S. Jones joined syndicated columnist and co-editor of The American Prospect Robert Kuttner, Congressional Quarterly reporter Alissa Rubin, and Time reporter Karen Tumulty to discuss how effectively the press had covered budget issues and negotiations. What issues were undercovered by the media? Was a balanced budget really necessary? What political pressures were felt by Republicans and Democrats that made them reopen the government?
Rubin and Tumulty believed that the shutdown forced people to really think about government and realize that there were parts of it that they actually liked. But what forced conservatives to agree to reopen the government? On that question the guests’ opinions diverged: Rubin said that when Republicans received phone calls from their constituents back home they started to think that it was not right “that the federal workforce at a prison in my district should have been affected by this.” She added, “They didn’t want the appearance of hurting people they weren’t trying to hurt from agencies that they actually liked.”
Tumulty said she heard from legislators that it wasn’t phone calls and demonstrations, but the, “...steady drip, drip, drip of stories...the first three stories each night on the network news were about federal workers who couldn’t pay their mortgages and how they couldn’t open a newspaper without reading [about] this shutdown. [This kind of coverage] suddenly reduced [this crisis], really for the first time, to a human level.”
1Hendrix, Steve, “The government shutdown: We’ve been here before, and it lasted weeks,” The Washington Post, 20 January, 2018.
2Gonyea, Don, “The Longest Government Shutdown In History, No Longer — How 1995 Changed Everything,” NPR.org, 12 January, 2019.
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