Fellow Fridays: #ShutDown Edition

Fellow Fridays is a series of profiles of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) roster of 14 senior fellows. This week, we are sharing commentary and opinions from the senior fellows regarding the shutdown.

Senator Robert Bennett

• Desert News: Raising the debt limit is necessary | “Failure to raise the debt limit would not get our financial house in order. Instead, it would massively damage vital governmental functions, crash the stock market and plunge us back into recession, stopping all economic growth and making paying off the debt much harder. Why is anyone even considering such a step?”

Senator Pete V. Domenici

• CNN: Government shutdown threat is getting very old, very fast

Senator Byron Dorgan

• The Hill: Shutdown: ‘A pox on everybody’s house’ | “I don’t think anyone comes out of this looking better than when it started,” said former Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.). “It’s kind of a pox on everybody’s house.”
• US News & World Report: 120,000-Member ‘Citizen Cabinet’ Proposed By Ex-Congressmen “The noise of democracy is not the right noise to guide our country,” Dorgan said, denouncing “trumped up polling [and] phony grass-roots campaigns.”

Secretary Dan Glickman

• BBC News: Lessons from the last government shutdown
• CNN The Situation Room: Shutdown is “embarrassing”
• Huffington Post: Governing by crisis is no way to lead “Congress’ primary job — really its only job as the entity with the “power of the purse” — is to pass a budget, which sets the topline numbers for spending that are later used to write and pass 12 appropriations bills to fund agencies like the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and so forth. This process has completely broken down. In fact, the last time Congress was able to pass all 12 appropriations before the start of the fiscal year was in 1994, just before the last big shutdown crisis.”
• POLITICO: CEOs seek big deal to end shutdown, debt crisis | “We’re in totally uncharted territory,” Glickman said, positing that one possible scenario includes lawmakers moving to approve a short-term funding package that raises the debt ceiling to buy time to work out a bigger deal. “It’s pretty hard for me to see a grand bargain by Wednesday.”

Senator Olympia Snowe

• LA Times: This is no way to run a country | “What is required is a political reward at the ballot box for those politicians who work toward common ground, and a penalty for those who do not. That’s my message now. And to further it, I’ve established Olympia’s List, a rallying point for those interested in identifying and supporting candidates who are willing to reach across the political aisle and follow the principles of consensus-building. And at the Bipartisan Policy Center, where I am a senior fellow, we are encouraging Americans to join a new effort called Citizens for Political Reform to demand bipartisanship.”
• MSNBC Andrea Mitchell Reports: Public needs to express opposition | “The public has to engage in this process. To make divided government work.”
• CNN Newsroom: I don’t recognize my party | “Both [parties] need to be working together to solve the problems of this great nation, and that simply isn’t happening, and that’s what contributed to my departure from the senate. I believe in its potential, as I’ve said, and I love the institution, and I’m now fighting on the outside, precisely because of the problems that persist today.”

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

• LA Times: Antonio Villaraigosa’s newest gig: “At a time when our government has been shut down and Washington is mired in a partisan meltdown, I couldn’t be prouder to work with an organization that works with both Democrats and Republicans to move our government and nation forward.”