I called up the American prospects David Dayan yesterday because I had this question gnawing at me.

As I watched the government sputter to a close on Tuesday, the whole project felt off.

More like a whimper than a bang, which was weird because this show has been anticipating

a government shutdown for weeks. And I knew that when I asked David why I was feeling this way,

he'd have an answer for me. Well, because we've really been in kind of a slow motion shutdown

for quite a while now.

What David means here is that the Trump administration has been sending government employees

home for months, clawing back federal funding, too. A shutdown is what happens when

congressionally appropriated funds run out.

But the truth is, Congress has been sitting on the sidelines of appropriations all year.

So the Trump administration has withheld something like if we believe the calculations of the Senate and House Appropriations Committee's Democratic staffs,

$410 billion in funding, that, just to give you the numbers, is close to half of all non-defense discretionary spending in the last fiscal year.

The president has been spending on what he likes and not spending on what he doesn't like. And that's kind of what happens in a government

shutdown. And so that's why I think it feels like nothing has fundamentally changed.

Different reporters have explained the cognitive dissonance of this moment in their own terms.

Some have attributed the strangeness to which party seems most committed to pulling the federal plug.

Unlike in previous shutdowns, Democrats are the ones who withheld their votes

and effectively turned out the lights. But David says that framing is not quite fair.

The president now bolstered by the Supreme Court has the ability to pick and choose what he wants to

spend. So, you know, the idea that

there's even government funding at all rather than a government suggestion of funding that then

the emperor king decides, yes, I will, I will send that funding out or no, I won't, is quite ridiculous. That is the reality of this

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