A Government Held in Suspension

The shutdown reflects not just a procedural failure, but a shift in how political loyalty is defined.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Another government shutdown. At this point, no one in Washington can pretend to be surprised. Senate leaders floated a three-bill “minibus” as a gesture of progress, while House leadership insisted on holding out for leverage that would signal ideological purity to their base. Senators huddle in closed-door lunches. Leaders argue over whether the stopgap should expire in December or stretch into January. It all feels familiar. And that familiarity is exactly what makes it deeply unsettling. The American system wasn’t designed to avoid conflict. Instead, the founders assumed division was a part of democracy—not a failure of it—and designed our governing institutions to refine disagreement into deliberation. Yet the current shutdown reflects a shift in political incentives. Today, unyielding opposition is rewarded over negotiation.

To understand how we arrived at this political moment, it’s worth returning to the debates that shaped the republic’s structure. James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10 that factions are an inevitable part of human nature. The question was not how to eliminate disagreement, but how to channel it. Madison believed that a large republic with many competing interests would force negotiation; no single group would be strong enough to rule unchecked. As he wrote in Federalist No.55, “had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” In other words, increasing civic participation does not guarantee sound judgment. The founders saw the need to slow down the decision-making process to allow competing arguments to be heard and evaluated. The Senate was meant to embody that principle. It was designed to cool the passions of the moment, ensuring that decisions were shaped by reason rather than pressure or impulse. 

The Anti-Federalists took a slightly different tack. They warned that a national legislature might become too distant and insulated from the people it sought to serve. Representation, they urged, only works when there is genuine proximity between the people and those who speak for them.

While such debates took place almost 250 years ago, their importance has not faded. In one way, The Federalists and Anti-Federalists were not arguing against each other so much as agreeing: they were warning about different ways in which the same system might break. The Federalists hoped that well-designed institutions would restrain power; the Anti-Federalists believed that accountability would check institutions. The possibilities they warned about converge today, not because one faction has seized control, but because factions have learned to use the system’s own rules to block compromise and avoid resolution altogether.

One mechanism in particular makes the current stalemate possible: the Senate filibuster. The filibuster was not a safeguard envisioned by the framers; it emerged—almost accidentally—in 1806, when the Senate removed a rule allowing a majority to end debate. Over time, the filibuster became a defining feature of Senate procedure. What began as a way to ensure extended debate has evolved into a tool that allows a determined minority to halt legislation entirely.

Since passing funding bills in the Senate requires 60 votes to advance, a unified bloc of just 41 senators can block progress entirely, using the filibuster to turn a shutdown into a stage for signaling ideological loyalty rather than working toward agreement. Both parties know the filibuster is what makes shutdowns possible, but neither is willing to get rid of it. During the latest shutdown, President Trump publicly urged Senate Republicans to “terminate the filibuster” so they could reopen the government on their own terms. Yet GOP leadership rejected the idea, arguing that doing so would simply hand the same power to Democrats the next time the chamber flips. Democrats understand this as well. Keeping the 60-vote threshold preserves their ability to block legislation when they are in the minority. In this sense, the filibuster functions less as a tool of deliberation and more as a form of political insurance. Each party wants to protect it to preserve its future capacity to obstruct.

The unfortunate result is a Senate that no longer mediates factional conflict but intensifies it. The Senate, once imagined as the cooling chamber of democratic passions, now amplifies stalemate by granting outsized power to the minority. The structure that was meant to refine disagreement ends up freezing it in place. This shutdown is an outcome of a system that makes obstruction easy to execute and difficult to reverse.

This week’s developments make the dynamic even clearer. After more than a month of stalled negotiations, Senate leaders agreed to a short-term deal to reopen the government through January 30. It restores pay to federal workers and resumes basic services, but it does little to settle the dispute that triggered the shutdown. As Senator Dick Durbin put it, “The government shutting down seemed to be an opportunity to lead us to better policy. It didn’t work.” The shutdown lifts, but the stalemate remains. And that impasse points to an issue that’s deeper than congressional rules. 

The problem isn’t only procedural. It’s cultural. We are living in a moment of deep polarization, where political ideology has become closely tied to personal identity. When party affiliation becomes a marker of who you are rather than what you believe, representatives are expected to defend their side rather than negotiate across differences. In that environment, compromise doesn’t look like governance. It looks like disloyalty.

The founders believed that institutional structures could channel ambition toward the common good, but those structures assumed a shared civic identity amongst the people. Government shutdowns are often described as failures of negotiation, failures of strategy, failures of leadership. But they also mark the quiet erosion of something harder to measure: a shared understanding of what it means to govern together. The Constitution still stands, and the chambers still open each day. The votes, even when they lead to nothing substantive, are still cast. But the underlying principle of self-governance depends on more than procedures. It requires trust, patience, and a willingness to share responsibility. The founders feared many things: tyranny, disorder, the volatility of public opinion. But they also feared that the republic might one day lose the spirit of energetic deliberation—that the government would not be overthrown but gradually slowed, stalled, and neutered.