RICH LOWRY: The shutdown was pointless and dumb

Our long national nightmare is over, but the Democratic psychodrama isn’t.

The longest shutdown in U.S. history — with increasing pain points across the country, especially among travelers — is ending, while the Democratic recriminations are just getting started. “It’s complete BS,” was a relatively mild take on the deal from one congressional progressive.

As a rule of thumb, government shutdowns are bootless exercises. They don’t work because the party that causes the shutdown, thinking that it will provide leverage, invariably gets blamed for the shutdown and then — surprise! — ends up in a worse position than where it began. Democrats managed to escape the worst political fallout from their weeks-long refusal to fund the government. Otherwise, the tactic failed, and predictably so.

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