The nothing shutdown

After 35 days, two missed paychecks for federal employees, billions of dollars in purported losses to thousands of contractors and other private entities, and a few hours of possible inconvenience for travelers at the international airport where President Trump houses his private aircraft, the longest government shutdown in history is finally coming to an end.

It accomplished nothing. Did it allow Trump to secure the nearly $6 billion he demanded to fund the construction of a wall along our southern border? No. Did it obtain green cards or even some form of temporary protection for the hundreds of thousands of former participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program? No.

As one of our minor American bards put it, "No thought was put into this."

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The worst thing of all? It's only going away for three weeks. Meanwhile the president and the Democratic Party remain as divided on the question of funding for the border wall as they were in December. The deal will fund the government for less than a month while members of both parties in Congress are expected to "negotiate." What do they have to say to each other that they have not been saying for days and weeks and months now? Nothing will come of it — or at least, nothing that justifies the president's or his party's willingness to support this untenable position.

As long as Democrats control the House, the wall is never going to happen. The endless whingeing about their past support for it misses the point. Politicians change their minds about all sorts of things every day. It is almost never because they have had a genuine change of heart. These shifts follow a straightforward pattern: The Blue Team says x because it is rhetorically beneficial to them at a certain juncture. The Red Team says not x for the same reason. Eight or even four years later the Red Team might say x and the Blue Team not x, making exactly the same arguments as the other side. Who cares.

Trump needs to get creative here. A man who once convinced his fellow citizens that Gary Busey was a budding entrepreneur and that ordinary dihydrogen monoxide placed in a container emblazoned with his surname was a mystical life-enhancing substance called "Trump Water" should be smart enough to pitch a non-wall wall to his supporters: additional border security personnel, drones, increased cooperation with authorities in Mexico, the 700 miles of already existing barriers. Maybe the real wall was the constitutional paralysis and institutional decline we met along the way.

Either that or Trump needs to attempt to fund the wall unilaterally by declaring a state of national emergency. This is exactly what the president threatened to do at the end of his remarks announcing the temporary deal on Friday afternoon. We'll see whether he really means it. For opponents of the policy this might in fact be the most desirable option because it would trigger an endless series of legal challenges that could set the whole thing back to 2021, when it will be irrelevant. If Trump is re-elected he will be under no obligation to make good on his promise and will explain it away however he can; if he loses, the wall will not be pursued by his successor. Anyone who doubts that an attempt to remake our immigration system unilaterally by executive order can be reversed in a matter of minutes should revisit the history of, well, DACA.

In the meantime, the most important thing is preventing another shutdown. I am not very optimistic about this, though the legal grounds for the very existence of "government shutdowns" as we know them are shaky at best. As my colleague Ryan Cooper pointed out recently, there is no reason that in the future if Congress and the White House fail to agree on a budget in a timely manner our various federal departments and agencies should not simply continue to operate with existing levels of funding indefinitely.

This should never happen again.