REPORTER: Aaron Lewis
Imagine a game. A great, strategic game, where every move matters and, win or lose, the stakes are very high. This week, that very game was being played out here, in the United States Congress.
HARRY REID, DEMOCRAT: We actually work for the American people. They sent us here to get things done, not to play these silly games.
JOHN BOEHNER, REPUBLICAN: I get 'The Wall Street Journal' out and it says, "We don't care how long this lasts, because we're winning." This isn't some damn game! The American people don't want our government shut down, and neither do I.
STEVE KING, REPUBLICAN: We cannot capitulate on constitutional principles. We cannot tolerate a President who decides that he is going to right law from the Oval Office. He has no authority.
Republican Congressman Steve King, along with almost two dozen other sitting members of his party have succeeded in their plan to shut down the American government until their partisan political demands are met.
THOMAS MANN, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: You're willing to take the entire government hostage. If you're willing to take the full faith in credit of the US hostage, like holding a gun or a cannon to someone's head to get what you want, then you are violating our whole constitutional system.
The government stopped functioning more than two weeks ago. Non-emergency employees were sent on indefinite leave and left without a pay cheque. Federal services suspended, including the social safety net and veterans' services. And now, in two days' time, if the government does not return to work and authorise the issuance of US Treasury bonds, America will, for the first time in its history, begin to default on its more than $16 trillion debt. It will hit the debt ceiling.
JIM HIMES, DEMOCRAT: The dynamics of this drive in Washington, and certainly right now, is the civil war between the establishment, older legacy wing of the Republican Party and the right-wing populists that we call the Tea Party. For them, this is a - you know, this is an OK tactic.The Speaker of the House, Republican John Boehner, is one of the old guard.
MAN: Good morning, Mr Speaker.
JOHN BOEHNER: Good morning.
The Speaker has suddenly found himself in the nearly impossible position of negotiating a way out of the deadlock brought on by this hard core faction in his own party.
JOHN BOEHNER: Good morning.
MADAM LEADER: Good morning. How are you?
JOHN BOEHNER: Are you encouraged by last night?
MADAM LEADER: Am I encouraged by last night?
JOHN BOEHNER: Yes. They're talking!
Boehner is also negotiating with Democrats and the President, who seem to have decided that enough is enough.
BARACK OBAMA, US PRESIDENT: One faction of one party, in one house of Congress, in one branch of government, shut down major parts of the government. All because they didn't like one law.
JOHN BOEHNER: They don't want to talk. The President doesn't want to talk. We tried to offer a bill, with parts of the government, only to have them rejected by our counterparts over in the United States Senate. The President is fond of saying that no-one gets everything they want in a negotiation. And, frankly, I agree with that. Nobody gets everything they want.
This single law, the Affordable Care Act, nicknamed Obamacare, has appeared to be at the centre of the stalemate in Washington politics for years now.
FEMALE REPORTER: Will you reopen the government? If the President doesn't agree with anything...?
JOHN BOEHNER: The ands and buts, nuts, every day...
JOSEPH CROWLEY, DEMOCRAT: Really?! Is that what we shut the government down for? I think Americans have to be scratching their heads, if that's what this is all about.
REPORTER: If that's not what it's all about, what is it about?
JOSEPH CROWLEY: You have to ask the Republicans at this point. The Republican caucus shut down the government. That is clear. And they're threatening to default on the national debt. That is all clear.
As the shutdown has gone on, and the debt crisis deepened, it's become increasingly clear that this is not just about Obamacare, but a last-ditch effort to, in effect, undo the Obama presidency.
JOHN BOEHNER: And in a democracy, you can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.
It's the ultimate sum of a clear calculus - that by obstructing President Obama at every single step, that a handful of the Republican Party's most ideologically driven members could reorder the balance of power.
TOM DAVIS, FORMER REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN: Why I think this is a bad fight for the Republicans is that 85% of Obamacare is not appropriated funding. So, by not funding it, you are, in effect, disabling it and making it an inefficient deliverer of health services, but you're not killing Obamacare. That goes on. The real question is closing the government down is inconvenient, it's inefficient, it's got a lot of bad ramification and there is a lot of collateral damage. But what really hurts is if you stop paying your bills. And that jeopardises the whole economic system, not just for this country but for the world.
There seems to be a growing consensus outside the halls of Congress that all parties are not equally to blame for where America finds itself. That's reflected in the sweeping downturn of popularity for the Republican Party in the major polls and the smaller but still significant downturn for President Obama.
THOMAS MANN: He ran on the platform of a post-partisan presidency. He wanted to set aside these differences and work together. He appealed to the Republicans.
REPORTER: Did he mean it?
THOMAS MANN: Yes. He was... And there's good reporting on this. Republicans decided the evening of inauguration day in a meeting in the caucus restaurant, the way to operate was as a parliamentary opposition against anything. Under no circumstances engage in negotiations. Uh...
REPORTER: And this was an actual decision?
THOMAS MANN: This was a decision of the Republican Party.
Hitting the debt ceiling would be like a domino - the first step into unknown territory that may or may not lead to financial disaster. Refusing to raise the debt ceiling means the government would simply run out of money. The uncertainty of what happens then is part of the threat. Ideological Republicans like Steve King are certain that the Administration will cave and default will be avoided.
STEVE KING: There will be no default on US debt. That's something that is being used by the President and his political allies to scare people. And if he succeeds in scaring the markets you might see the markets fluctuate but there will be no default. I would stake the family farm on that, I would stake my political career on that, I would stake my own integrity. There will be no default.
JIM HIMES: Political market forces are acting here and extreme behaviour is creating a backlash. And at some point these guys will act rationally and it looks like catastrophe will be averted. I have only been here five years, but many, many times catastrophe has been averted.
REPORTER: Do you have to get to catastrophe to get things down nowadays?
JIM HIMES: Well, unfortunately, it sort of looks that way.
If it has become necessary to manufacture catastrophe, to get government to govern, it's easy to understand why, to many Americans, the system looks broken.
THOMAS MANN: We spend a lot of time worrying about nuclear weapons and chemical, biological weapon, these are equally potentially destructive weapons. We could bring down the global economy with a failure to honour the full faith and credit of the United States.
STEVE KING: There may or may not be political consequences. I don't expect there will be. We can recover from any political consequences, but we could never recover from the implementation of Obamacare.
Can this extreme partisanship ever fit within an American system of government designed to check power at every turn? It's like a grand puzzle that's been laid out. Today, the pieces aren't fitting together and until a lasting solution is found, America will remain vulnerable to being shut down.
Reporter/Camera/Editor
AARON LEWIS
Producer
DONALD CAMERON
Fixers
GEORGE LERNER
HEATHER MESSERA
Original Music Composed by
VICKI HANSEN
15th October 2013