Government shut down - Essay Example

Analysis Looking back to the controversy background, the United States constitution states and requires the United States Congress to pass the bills of government spending approval, and has the power granted by law to fund the entire United States budget. This means that if the congress fails to pass an approved budget by the end of a financial year, a funding gap that leads to government shutdown. Media revelations claim that the 2013 United States federal government’s shutdown is a result of Obama’s refusal to accept the republican demands that requested him to change or delay the Affordable Care Act, which began enrolling patients on October 1st (Weisman and Peters, 2013).

However, Obama defended himself against the allegations and claimed that the house speaker John Boehner is the main person who triggered the shutdown. The blame game continues, and a Wednesday meeting held by Obama and the members of his house shifted the blame back to Obama by claiming that he refused to negotiate leading to no breakthrough. According to Times, swampland dated October 6, another congress meeting took place and the house speaker John Boehner insisted that the chamber was lacking enough votes to pass a “clean” bill that would raise the debt ceiling (Weisman and Peters, 2013).

He further argued that the bill would undergo a breakthrough if the two parties agreed hence; democrats have no choice but to make concession to the republicans, who hold out with an aim of using the government shutdown as a means of defunding or delaying the controversial Obama’s signature health-care-reform law. According to Boehner, the solution lays on the combined efforts of both rye democrats and the republicans because they can pass a measure to reopen and fund the government when the vote gets permission to come to the floor.

This meant that the next steps needed to resolve the stalemate remains unclear. A deeper look into the government shutdown reveals that this is not the usual spending battles. This is evident in the fact that the crisis emerged due to house republicans blocking the budget with an aim of killing or stripping all funding from Obama care (NA, 2013). In this case, they want the democrats to join the wagon of halting the president’s biggest achievement, yet the democrats are not willing to participate.

As the stalemate continues, the deadline for a budget bill approached and at the same time, republicans were still holding back to their demands. This makes the government shutdown more critical because the problem does not lay on how to acquire funds but the dilemma is on how to unlock the locked heads between the republicans and the democrats (NA, 2013). As the stalemate continues, the situation of the citizens worsen everyday because at the moment, eight thousand non essential staff working for federal agencies are jobless, while 1.

3 million others are required to work without pay. More so, non-urgent tasks are under shelves until when a deal comes along (Watkins, 2013). The situation will definitely damage the economy, yet the law making process is under paralysis meaning that