As this is written, it’s not known whether Congress’ and Barack Obama’s inability to do the correct thing will result in the shutdown of the federal government.

Wisconsin Reporter provides a history of said shutdowns:

Since the previous shutdown was 18 years ago, people tend to think of it as a rare occurrence. Actually, government shutdowns — or “funding gaps,” as the government more accurately refers to them because it continues to fund “essential services”— used to be a regular event, even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House.

According to the Congressional Research Service, there have been 17 federal shutdowns in U.S. history: six during  Jimmy Carter’s four years; eight during Ronald Reagan’s eight years; one for George H.W. Bush; and two for Bill Clinton.

The shutdowns lasted much longer during the Carter years than the Reagan years, when he had a Democratic Congress. Carter’s longest shutdown was for 17 days, between September and October 1978, and his shortest — two of them — were eight days, both in 1977. Reagan’s were all between one and three days, with a shutdown every year except for 1985 and 1988.

Bush 41’s only shutdown lasted three days. And note, it was Democrats who ran both houses of Congress with a Republican president.

The longest shutdown in history was on Bill Clinton’s watch. It lasted 22 days — Dec. 16, 1995, to Jan. 6, 1996, during the scaled-down holiday season — and was widely perceived as a PR disaster for Republicans.

There is currently an effort to claim that Republicans actually benefited from that ’96 shutdown because they picked up some Senate seats that year. But no one at the time perceived it as a Republican win, which is why so many oppose a shutdown now.

It also is important to note that nearly all of the shutdowns took place around the government’s fiscal new year, Oct. 1, as a result of budget battles.

I was the editor of Marketplace Magazine during the 1995 shutdown. I opened my Marketplace of Ideas column in the last issue of 1995 by discussing watching the Monday Night Football game, which ended at 11:07 p.m. (12:07 a.m. Eastern), which made me realize that as of seven minutes earlier, the federal government had been shut down. “Anarchy! Chaos! Lawlessness!” was what I wrote, even though there obviously was none of that.

Before that, the Washington Post notes …

In 1973, when Richard Nixon was president, Democrats in the Senate, including Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Walter Mondale (D-Minn.), sought to attach a campaign finance reform bill to the debt ceiling after the Watergate-era revelations about Nixon’s fundraising during the 1972 election. Their efforts were defeated by a filibuster, but it took days of debate and the lawmakers were criticized by commentators (and fellow lawmakers) for using “shotgun” tactics to try to hitch their pet cause to emergency must-pass legislation.

President Obama said that GOP lawmakers now are trying to “extort” repeal of the health care law via the debt limit, but that’s also what Democrats wanted to do with President Nixon, who opposed the campaign-finance reforms.

… to which James Taranto adds:

Here is where the analogy to the Nixon years gets very interesting. The Republicans did not sneak into Congress to stage a surprise attack. They were duly elected in 2010 precisely because of widespread public opposition to ObamaCare. That law was enacted by the requisite majorities, if bare ones, in both houses of Congress. Yet while it was not illegitimate, it felt that way, and it would be fair to characterize its enactment as a failure of democratic governance. Had members of the House and Senate responded to their constituents’ wishes rather than presidential and partisan pressure, it would have gone down to defeat, probably overwhelmingly.

To be sure, backlash against ObamaCare did not prove sufficient to deny Obama a second term. His supporters claim that even if the 2010 election left the question of ObamaCare unsettled, the 2012 election resettled it. The morning after Election Day, it would have been hard to disagree.

Yet Obama is now in a position very much analogous to that of President Nixon in 1973. We now know that government corruption–namely IRS persecution of dissenters–was a factor in Obama’s re-election. To be sure, Obama himself has not, at least so far, been implicated in the IRS wrongdoing as Nixon ultimately was in Watergate. On the other hand, Nixon’s re-election victory was so overwhelming that no one could plausibly argue Watergate was a necessary condition for it. The idea that Obama could not have won without an abusive IRS is entirely plausible.

Hot Air reports the results of a Pepperdine University poll:

Down to the final days of the nation’s current spending plan, with negotiations over a new one at a standstill, nearly half of small business owners are in favor of shutting the government down, according to a new poll.

Researchers at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management conducted the survey, which found that 48 percent of business owners support at least a temporary government shutdown, compared to 42 percent who say policymakers should hurry up and strike a deal. Of the poll’s 1,387 respondents, more than 90 percent own businesses with no more than 200 workers.

Half of respondents said they could get behind a shutdown for up to a month, and nearly a third would support shuttering the government for up to three months.

Hot Air adds:

Almost nine in ten of respondents think that a shutdown of a single day will either have no impact (69%) or only a slightly negative impact (17%). After a week, that shifts to 44% and 29%, respectively, but still three-quarters thinking a shutdown will have a negligible impact on the economy, and at two weeks it’s 27% and 32%. At one month, though, it drops to 13% and 27%.

On the other hand, a longer period won’t result in job losses right away.  It takes 2 months to get out to 20% of respondents considering staff reductions. Even at 6 or more months, only 39% of small businesses believe a government shutdown would force them to lay off employees — although for companies of $100 million in revenue or more, the 50% mark comes at 5 months.

Republicans have to be cheered by this finding, too:

What do small businesses want? According to the charts, 63% want a one-year delay in ObamaCare’s implementation, while only 27% want it to go into effect tomorrow as scheduled.  Forty-seven percent want full repeal, while another 27% want revisions, for an overall opposition of 74%.  Sixty percent expect the law to force health care costs to rise, while only 11% believe those costs will go down.  Fifty-eight percent expect to reduce their benefits package, 49% expect to reduce bonuses, and 47% plan to pull back on future hiring as a result.

Small wonder they don’t mind a shutdown.

This has been known to happen in Wisconsin when there is disagreement between the governor and the Legislature around the start of a new budget cycle, July 1 of every odd-numbered year. Unlike the feds, though, if a state budget isn’t passed, the previous budget and its spending and tax levels remains in effect.

The reason the state is smart enough to figure that out but the feds aren’t is that, of course, there are perceived political gains to be had by a “shutdown.” The shutdown is actually the temporary closing of what the feds consider non-essential services. If a natural disaster occurs in the next few days, the feds will be there. If the Russians try to invade, the military will be there. For other federal services: Our federal budget deficits are now measured in 15 digits, and you can add another digit to our federal debt.

The other fiscal apocalypse taking place tonight is the expiration of the extension of the federal Farm Bill. Without a “new” Farm Bill (that is, an extension of the original Farm Bill that dates back to, believe it or don’t, 1949), the result, the radio said this morning, would be milk prices shooting up to $6 per gallon.

One of the cardinal rules of politics is that good fiscal policy is never the result of a “crisis.” If we need a Farm Bill at all, we do not need a Farm Bill that extends something put together when Harry Truman was president. We do need an actually balanced federal budget, and we’re not going to get one in any year beginning with a 2, because one party in Washington doesn’t believe in balanced budgets, and the other believes in them in theory but not in practice.