Katie Pavlich: The glaring government shutdown double standard

Good news, America. In typical last-minute fashion, Washington has averted its latest budget crisis. Politicians will make it home to celebrate Christmas on time after dumping $1.1 trillion of your money into a “cromnibus” spending bill full of unnecessary and unaffordable goodies. But before everyone leaves Washington for the holidays, there’s a glaring double standard begging to be addressed. 

Just one short year ago, newly minted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took to the Senate floor in protest of funding ObamaCare through a continuing resolution. He started a filibuster that lasted nearly 22 hours, and eventually the government shut down for 16 days.

“Government shutdown is the Republicans’ fault — period,” the Baltimore Sun wrote. “The House GOP has nothing to show for its government shutdown,” The Washington Post said. Cruz even drew fire from fellow Republicans like Sen. John McCain, who repeated a line from President Obama to pile on with Democrats, instead of joining the majority of Republicans in the House, saying, “Elections have consequences.” 

Despite the doomsday messages and over-the-top panicked warnings from the left and the media about the consequences of a government shutdown, there really weren’t any. In fact, the shutdown of 2013 was hardly a blip on the radar screen. We were told Cruz “shutting down the government” would cost Republicans the 2014 midterm elections. It didn’t. Republicans just had one of the most victorious elections in U.S. history, gaining seats at every single level of government across the country and finally stripping Harry Reid of his power. 

Fast forward one year to December 2014 and another fresh-faced senator has captured the government shutdown spotlight during debate over budgeting.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) partnered with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and threatened to pull support for cromnibus unless a provision loosening suffocating Dodd-Frank regulations for financial institutions was taken out of the bill. (For reference, Dodd-Frank costs the U.S. financial sector 24 million man-hours each year to comply.) This action could have easily led to a government shutdown and the senator from Massachusetts very well knew it, and so did her friends in the press.

Regardless, with the shutdown threat looming this time around, the doomsday headlines were missing in action and replaced with glowing admiration for Warren “taking a stand” and “making her mark” with her populace principles. 

“Elizabeth Warren joins revolt against Wall Street deal in government shutdown talks,” the Huffington Post wrote. “ ‘Warning shot’: Sen. Warren on fighting banks, and her political future,” NPR said.

But it isn’t just that the press failed to treat Warren with the same standards and coverage as they did Cruz — they failed to call her out on her own hypocrisy.

“You’d think that they believe that the government that functions best is a government that doesn’t function at all,” Warren said in a 2013 Senate floor speech in response to Cruz. “So far, they haven’t ended government, but they have achieved the next best thing: shutting the government down. But behind all the slogans of the Tea Party and all the thinly veiled calls for anarchy in Washington, behind all that, there’s a reality.”

What’s the reality Warren is really referring to? Shutting down government is justified so long as it’s done by a liberal Democrat and for all of the reasons senators like Warren can justify.

Not only did Warren receive heaps of positive press for her actions, fellow Democrats publicly applauded her for nearly sabotaging the latest spending bill.

“Elizabeth Warren is, even if people don’t agree with her, she’s constructive. She’s not like Ted Cruz and say, shut down the government or don’t fund things if I don’t get my way,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” over the weekend.

Hypothetically, if the government had shut down last week as a result of Warren’s objections, I highly doubt the feds would have gone through the same efforts as they did in 2013 to make the shutdown as unnecessarily painful as possible by putting up barriers around D.C. monuments, blocking WWII vets who had flown hundreds of miles, ripping down websites for extra drama and replacing them with text about the shutdown, etc. 

The issue here is the principles around which government should be shut down, and it happens on both the left and the right. Where the media stands on those issues is crystal clear based on their coverage of Cruz and Warren.

But if government shutdowns don’t actually have a huge impact long-term, then why does this matter? The 2016 presidential election is here and both Warren and Cruz will likely be running despite giving vague non-answers or straight denial about jumping into the race for the White House. Warren will be painted as a healthy alternative to Hillary Clinton, while Cruz will be promoted as a right-winger too extreme to come out victorious through the Republican primary process.

I can see the arguments now: Warren wasn’t attempting to shut down the government, she was simply trying to hold Wall Street accountable. Cruz, on the other hand, his government shutdown will haunt him in 2016.

The double standard continues.

Pavlich is the news editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.