Fortunately, the pushes for a shutdown from the left and the right got little traction.
There is an obvious solution: separate the shutdown from the arguments over border security.
Federal courts have been operating essentially as normal during the government shutdown from the fee money they collect.
Tom Cotton, who beat Mark Pryor in Arkansas, backed last year's government shutdown from the House while Mr McConnell was busily trying to end it in the Senate.
Lawmakers brushed up on the lessons of the five days of November 1995, when 800,000 federal workers were sent home, and the 21-day partial shutdown from that December to January, when half the government closed.
"The emphasis throughout the shutdown from the accelerator teams has been on safety, to avoid another incident, and to make sure that things continue to run smoothly," Prof David Charlton, head of the Atlas collaboration, told the Guardian.
He bought an abandoned copper mine in Butte and restarted it twice, first with nonunion labor in the 1980s and again after the shutdown from the energy crisis; today the business is worth an estimated $1.2 billion.
Yet despite repeated calls for Indian Point's shutdown from the early 1970s on, it keeps operating.
The methodless madness distinguishes this shutdown from prior Congressional Republican defeats (the Gingrich shutdown, the Clinton impeachment), when you could at least see what the politicians involved were thinking.
By this point in the testing process, my body had begun to shutdown from too much salt and xanthan gum, but I managed a couple of tastes.
