This powerful neighbor | A country run by “kindergarten children”

Having a recurring nightmare is both unbearable and exhausting.

Talk to the Americans…

The threat of paralysis of the federal state is once again looming on the horizon. A shutdown (yes, another one!) could take place from 1^er october.

It would be the equivalent of a nightmare for several million federal government employees who would no longer receive their pay. For the health of the American economy, too.

And as usual, it would inconvenience millions of other Americans: those who use various public services who would be affected in one way or another. We will remember the chaos at airports across the country in 2019 when Transportation Security Administration employees decided not to show up for work.

I write “as usual” because that is exactly what is happening: it is becoming a habit.

The numbers are overwhelming. The federal state has already been paralyzed by a shutdown more than 20 times in the last five decades. These sad episodes have their origins in a position adopted in the early 1980s by the country’s attorney general: he ruled that federal agencies must stop spending if the elected representatives of the American Congress do not adopt the budget by the prescribed date.

Most recent shutdown was also the longest. It lasted 35 days in 2018 and 2019, when Donald Trump sought to obtain from the US Congress the necessary funding to build his wall on the border with Mexico.

The one who best described what is happening these days in Washington, in my opinion, is the Democratic politician from Connecticut, Jim Himes. According to him, “the most powerful government in the world is making a fool of itself and showing the world that it is run by kindergarteners.”

This announced debacle is not a surprise. With the radicalization of a handful of Republican elected officials in the House of Representatives of the American Congress, it was written in the sky.

“It’s a whole new concept of people just wanting to burn everything down. It’s not working,” said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last week.

He wasn’t talking about his Democratic rivals.

He pointed the finger at some of his Republican colleagues, who refuse to give their approval to the adoption of the 2024 budget.

I called Antoine Yoshinaka, an associate professor in the political science department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, to get his thoughts on this.

Yes, the radicalization of elected officials is at the source of this new potential fiasco, he says.

But he reminded me that the narrow majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives is also part of the problem.

There are currently 221 Republicans to 212 Democrats in this chamber of the United States Congress.

“Normally, in the past, Republicans had a majority of a few dozen seats and could afford to have dissenting votes. But here, they cannot afford to lose more than four votes if the Democrats are in opposition. So that gives disproportionate power to this more extremist wing. »

If a shutdown were to happen, it would be another humiliation for Kevin McCarthy.

To think that last January, he had cajoled the most radical Republican elected officials in order to collect the number of votes required to be elected president of the House of Representatives. He won after 15 rounds of voting.

He signed a pact with the devil, but the problem is that Satan continues to torment him.

Some might rejoice by telling themselves that in the event of shutdownthe Republican Party will lose ground in public opinion.

By saying, therefore, that the Democrats will perhaps benefit from it in the next elections.

And by convincing themselves that it will be so much the better, because the Republican elected officials could lose control of the House of Representatives.

Adults (Democrats) could therefore run the government again, to use Jim Himes’ metaphor.

But a long-term and less partisan reading would be more prudent and wiser.

In terms of the health of American democracy, a new shutdown would in my opinion be anything but good news.

A recent poll revealed that the threat of shutdown has already lowered the trust in government of 68% of Americans.

“I completely agree,” Antoine Yoshinaka told me when I asked him to validate this analysis. When people hear “shutdown of government”, that doesn’t help, when we are trying to demonstrate to the public that our institutions work, that democracy can work and that even in a very polarized era, we can succeed in getting along and moving things forward. things. »

We therefore understand that a shutdown would be very good news… for Donald Trump. He has used disaffection with democratic institutions as fuel since entering politics. When everything burns, he rubs his hands.

It’s a constant: the worse American democracy is, the better Donald Trump is. With just over a year until the next presidential election, this is an equation that we would be wrong to ignore.