Opinion | There’s No Precedent for This Shutdown

Yeah, I kind take it for granted that Congress doesn’t function anymore. And hasn’t for a long time. But I think we’re a step beyond that; this is a little bit different than what we’ve gotten used to over the last few years, where a creaky and increasingly dysfunctional system kind of chugs along, breaking down from time to time. This is the kind of rapid disassembly of the American project. And there’s no precedent for how you behave in this situation. And so there are people for whom I think psychologically, the go-to move is just to pretend that things are of normal and pretend that old rulebooks apply and there are other people who maybe don’t necessarily know where we’re heading, but I think who have the correct intuition that they just have to be the opposition.