Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, October 1st, 2013, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that would last 16 days.

Congress was unable to pass a budget for the next year, nor were they able to pass a continuing resolution

for interim funds.

So things came to a halt.

This was the third longest shutdown in American history.

About 800,000 federal employees were furloughed another 1.3 million

were required to work without pay and it was one of those moments where we've all faced it.

You have that eternal question, wait a minute, am I an essential employee?

What do I do here?

But anyway, leading up to that moment,

there was a huge political fight as well.

We had the Tea Party insurgents among the Republicans

fights over Obamacare, the 21-hour floor speech from Ted Cruz.

So let's talk about why government's shut down, what the shutdown was really about,

and I don't know, I feel like maybe we're suffering from government government shutdown fatigue so we'll get into that a little bit as well

Nicole Hammer of Columbia is here as always hello Mickey

Hello Jody and back with us for one more episode is Steve Kornaki of NBC and

MSNBC and author of the red and the blue Steve thank you for doing this.

glad to be here. So we have Republicans controlling the House, Democrats controlling

the Senate obviously Obama's president.

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