The dumbest thing about “government shutdowns” isn’t that they’re erroneously called “shutdowns” (blog entry, 2013). And it isn’t even that they almost never accomplish what their engineers think they will. Those are both dumb things, but...

No, the dumbest thing about government shutdowns is that they happen at all.

As I wrote more than five years ago, I assume the Founders didn’t mention this scenario in the Constitution because they simply couldn’t conceive of our elected representatives being so unAmerican that they would intentionally and measurably harm their own country in order to score political points or get some traction on a personal pet project that they couldn’t otherwise work through the legislative process. If anything, I wish those venerable slaveholding white men had included a line that required all of Congress to disband and immediately be replaced in special elections (with no incumbents allowed), if such a stupid thing ever happened.

But that line isn’t there, and it’s notoriously difficult to change the Constitution — look at how long the ERA has languished.

In a different entry five years ago, I wrote that the answer to that particular government shutdown was ridiculously obvious: pass the C.R. (continuing resolution, which temporarily funds the government until a budget is passed). What I missed then, but thought of a few days later, is that this is always the solution. If doing the exact same thing each time is always the answer, then why not make it official policy?

I’m not the only person who has thought of this (I rarely claim to be original). Annie Lowrey wrote recently in The Atlantic:

“There are many paths to ending the shutdown — TAINTUS could sign a funding bill without money for his border wall, say, or with paltry money for his border wall. Better yet, Congress could shut down the government-shutdown option, forever.

“It could do this by implementing something called an automatic-continuing-resolution provision, which legislators from both sides of the aisle have advanced numerous times over the past 30 years. Right now, when Congress cannot agree on how to spend money, it passes a continuing resolution, or CR, which continues federal agencies’ financing for a given period of time. Automatic CRs would absolve Congress from the responsibility of passing new CRs, preventing both quick financing lapses and big, painful shutdowns.

“The move would prevent the Senate from shutting down the government over disagreements with the House, Republicans from shutting down the government over disagreements with Democrats, and the White House from shutting down the government over disagreements with Congress. Money would just keep flowing at a steady rate, until Congress were to pass a formal budget or appropriations bill and the president were to sign it.”

Not long after, Slate got the idea too, and then The Washington Post published a story on the same topic.

Interestingly, the government already did this for the military, back in 2013, just hours before that huge shutdown began. Notably, both the House and the Senate passed that bill unanimously — it would have been re-election suicide to be the lone person who voted against paying our soldiers. But for some reason, it’s not a problem to ignore the hundreds of thousand non-military government employees — there are more of them than most people think.

Like many really good ideas that don’t make it to the floor in Congress, I assume this one hasn’t simply because not enough people are calling for it. In other words, it hasn’t (yet) generated the political will among the populace. It certainly hasn’t been mentioned in the news media very often.

If the idea of automatic CRs ever does come before Congress, and becomes law, it would work fairly simply (though I assume the bill itself would be complex, in order to cover a variety of scenarios and loopholes): Whatever funding was in place before the failure to pass a budget, that exact funding continues until a new budget is passed. This would mean federal workers would never be used as pawns in congressional budget arguments; they would keep coming to work and continue getting paid. Federal government services would continue unharmed while rich people in Congress argue about how to spend our money in the future.

A final note: Lowrey, in her article, mentioned a possible “legal and procedural barrier” to passing such a law: federal law currently prevents the government from spending money that hasn’t been appropriated by Congress. As with most things above my pay grade, I notice that experts disagree on this too. From a layperson’s perspective, it sure looks like if Congress passes a law mandating automatic continuing resolutions, then that money being spent IS appropriated by Congress.

The fact that we don’t have such a law looks like another case of our elected leaders not being able to see the forest for the trees. And the fact that our government was designed to occasionally be unable to function should be embarrassing to us all. Especially since it’s so easy to fix.