Shutdown affects Toreros

Record-breaking government shutdown impacts intersession in Washington D.C.

Glenn McDonnel / Asst. News Editor / The USD Vista

Some of the University of San Diego campus community experienced the U.S. Government Shutdown of 2018-2019 as little more than a constant headline in the news and perhaps a reason to arrive at the airport a bit earlier than usual. For students who traveled to Washington, D.C. to spend their intersession studying the inner workings of the capital with political science professor Karen Shelby, Ph.D., however, the effects of this historic political stalemate were much more apparent. 

Senior political science major Hannah Huante, who was one of the seven students in Shelby’s class titled “The Press and the Presidency,” said she witnessed how the shutdown was affecting the residents whose livelihoods depend on a constantly functioning Washington economy.  

“The people I saw there seemed lost in a sense,” Huante said. “Everyone I talked to was frustrated and confused from not knowing when the city was going to start back up again. It was just sad.” 

While in an Uber from her dorm to downtown, Huante said she and her driver discussed the sort of hardships he and others were enduring as a result of the downturn in spending caused by the hold on federal workers’ paychecks.  

“I mentioned how a girl on our program had actually been robbed at gunpoint while walking back to her dorm, and he said that he wasn’t all that surprised because the shutdown was causing people to do things they normally wouldn’t do,” Huante said. “It was crazy for me to think about how a disagreement in government could lead to that kind of desperation. It made me rethink how many people were actually being affected.” 

According to The Washington Post, more than 9,000 furloughed federal employees in the district’s Metro Area applied for unemployment claims. However, those considered “essential” to government functions were required to come into work without pay and were not eligible to apply for the same benefits. While existing legislation guarantees back-pay for these individuals at the conclusion of a shutdown, research conducted by The New York Times indicates that only one-third of federal employees can afford to miss two weeks worth of paychecks.  

This pinch on the pocketbooks of those who typically frequent the neighborhoods surrounding federal buildings caused many of the local small businesses to shorten business hours or close altogether. Huante says this made it somewhat challenging for her and the other students to find a place to eat or grab a cup of coffee during their stay.  

“Once or twice we would make a trip to a restaurant only to find out it was closed just because it was too expensive for them to stay open without enough people coming in,” Huante said. “It felt really empty at some of the places we went, like a ghost town. It really gave us a different perspective on D.C.” 

The impacts of the shutdown caused Huante and the others to have to miss out on some of the activities they had been looking forward to planning their time in the district.  

“The shutdown definitely put a strain on our whole trip because we couldn’t do a lot of the things we wanted to,” Huante said. “We were able to see the monuments and the White House and all that but I think it would have been a much better experience if we were able to see all the museums. I really wanted to go to the ones I hadn’t been to, like the Smithsonian and the Museum of African American History.”

While Huante was disappointed that the shutdown forced her to have to change her plans, she also recognizes the impact that it had on working people in the district and wishes the seminar lecturers would have focused more on this aspect of the deadlock on Capitol Hill.

“I feel like at some point it’s important to discuss the reality of the way that it’s hurting people,” Huante said. “Whenever one of our guest speakers brought up the shutdown, I felt like they would always talk about it in a way that avoided the human aspect and instead focused on the ridiculousness of the political aspects. It was all about the political issues with very little mention of the big question of how all those workers are going to pay their rent and feed their families.” 

Karen Shelby is a professor of political science at USD and Assistant Director of the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement, a multi-university organization which hosts discussions and promotes initiatives designed to combat hostility and divisiveness in public discourse. She served as USD’s faculty liaison for the cohort of students who attended The Washington Center’s winter seminar session, allowing her the chance to listen to the same speakers as Huante and her fellow students.  

“The speakers were a mixture of White House and Capitol Hill insiders who really ran the gamut in terms of where they sit on the political spectrum,” Shelby said. “A lot of their emphasis was on bipartisanship and how the parties can work together, but it also sounded like they were cautiously optimistic.”  

Following the daily visits from both former and current officials, advisors, and other district professionals, Shelby and her students would then discuss the content of the presentations in the context of the press and its role in political messaging, the focus of the course. One of the big topics covered was the “game” quality of how political developments are sometimes expressed in popular media, a dynamic Shelby considers problematic. 

“The games rhetoric does all of us a disservice because it shifts the content of what media is presenting to who’s losing the game and who’s winning instead of being about the substantive policy matters,” Shelby said. “These issues are far more complex– we can’t just scan a headline in a blink and make a snap decision; we need to engage.” 

During their two-week immersion as Washington insiders, the group of seven USD students were encouraged to do just that. The context of the longest shutdown in U.S. history, while inconvenient, provided these students with a unique chance to reflect on the importance of functioning government while witnessing the fallout caused by its absence from within.