Editorial: Democrats, Republicans should pass new law to end government shutdowns

Enough with shutdown politics.

The recent 35-day partial shutdown of the federal government — and other shutdowns in recent years — illustrate how broken U.S. governance and political discourse have become. When Democrats or Republicans believe that they can gain political leverage by holding government services and employees hostage to their tantrums, it should come as a sign that something must change.

This time, it was President Trump who “owned” the shutdown. Prior outages were the fault of leaders in one political party or the other.

This latest shutdown thrust 800,000 federal workers either…