Ah, here we go again—a government shutdown, courtesy of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and the Democrats. They couldn’t simply agree to a non-partisan continuing funding resolution; instead, they attempted to do a crazy power play and force their far-left agenda into the process, even though they don’t control the House, the Senate, or the Oval Office. Did they not take notes when former (Democrat) President Barack Obama famously said, “elections have consequences?”
But we’ve been here before—in fact, there have been seven shutdowns since 1990 (not including the one that’s about to start), some of them short, some of them longer.
The most memorable one to many is the 21-day shutdown in 1995-1996 under then-President Bill Clinton, because what happened during that time led to an impeachment of a popular president and a stain on our history (as well as a certain blue garment).
For those readers who are too young to remember or weren’t political junkies at the time, it’s hard to describe how magnetic Bill Clinton was. He was folksy, he was empathetic, he had a certain goofy charm. In fact, I would argue that he was the last major Democrat figure who was relatable in the slightest. He won the electoral college in both his presidential elections easily, despite the presence of third-party candidate Ross Perot, and enjoyed high approval ratings—even after l’affaire de Lewinsky was uncovered.
Like Barack Obama, however, he has inexplicably lost that magic in the modern day, and both he and Barry seem like irrelevant, tired DNC shills. (Clinton reportedly has health concerns, and I do not mean to make light of that. But whatever the cause, he doesn’t sway an audience the way he once did with such seeming ease.)
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But what happened in those shutdown days of '95-’96? Let’s revisit how a man with such promise almost threw it all away (and arguably ruined his reputation for the rest of history):
In November 1995, Newt Gingrich gave President Bill Clinton an ultimatum: approve cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other programs, or he would shut down the government. The ensuing shutdowns were a public embarrassment for Gingrich and a victory for Clinton, but the president’s behavior during those shutdowns hurt his presidency in the long-term.
That’s because it was then, while most government employees were out of the office on furlough, that Clinton began an affair with a 22-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
The normally buzzing White House turned into a ghost town, and a bored Clinton succumbed to his baser instincts. Sorry, there’s just no other way to put it:
“When the government shutdown happened, instead of 450 normal employees who staffed the White House on a regular day, there was a skeletal crew of 90,” says Monica Lewinsky in the A&E docu-series The Clinton Affair. “So all of the interns, not being employees of the government, stepped in.”
Lewinsky was actually supposed to start a staff job in the White House’s East Wing around this time, but the shutdown put that on hold. She ended up being sent to the West Wing to help answer thousands of phone calls that were overwhelming White House operators.
“Many of us found ourselves in parts of the White House and surrounded by people that we normally never interacted with,” Lewinsky contines. This included Clinton, who didn’t really have anything to do while the government was on hiatus, and began socializing with a lot of staff and interns he didn’t usually see very often.
The secrets, the scandals, the stories. The three night event #TheClintonAffair premieres Sunday at 9PM. pic.twitter.com/MrfqJIZnI9
— A&E (@AETV) November 14, 2018
We don’t need to go into the lurid details, but the shutdown then led to one of the most scandalous events in White House history:
While Lewinsky was walking to her desk on the evening of November 15, Clinton motioned her into the empty office of George Stephanopoulos, his senior advisor. He asked her several questions about herself, and Lewinsky ended up telling him that she had a little crush on him. Clinton then asked Lewinsky, an unpaid intern who worked for him, if she wanted to go into his private office with him—actions that many now regard as an abuse of power.
We all know what happened next, and the ramifications of Clinton’s “indiscretion” (immorality) have had repercussions ever since.
There’s no telling how long the current shutdown will last; it could be a day, it could be weeks. I’m pretty sure President Donald Trump won’t be hitting on twenty-something-year-old interns—he’s married to Melania, not Hillary—but the future is unknown at this time. I do know this, however: the Democrats have made a grievous mistake. Not only did they give Trump free rein to reshape the federal government, but they’ve shown the nation that they value extreme leftist values, like healthcare for illegal immigrants, over the daily lives of the American people.
The '95-'96 shutdown and Bill’s activities still haunt the Clintons and the entire Democratic Party to this day. Even though I was already leaning conservative back in those days, I held hope for his administration and rooted for him to succeed.
He let down an entire generation, and it’s sad.
