If you’ve ever traveled to France, chances are you’ve come up against this all-too-common phenomenon. You get to the train station and, without warning, your train is out of service. Or a restaurant is oddly closed during regular business hours.
“C’est la grève,” you may hear from a local, accompanied by a shrug. It’s the strike.
There’s a joke in France about their time-honored tradition of labor protests: A tourist asks a waiter what the signs are about at a protest across the street. The waiter hardly looks up and simply says, “Thursday.”
Strikes, protests, work stoppages and closures are so frequent in France, there are multiple apps and websites devoted to letting locals and tourists alike know what will be open and what will be closed, and those in the know check daily.
A strike today at schools in Dijon, Lyon and Rennes; an ongoing transport strike in Rouen; closures at the Louvre. One site promises: “Thanks to our service, unexpected problems are a thing of the past. You’ll no longer be stuck waiting for your train, and you can plan a backup solution!”
Americans may hear this and smugly scoff at a society that’s turned such dysfunction into a revered art form. But our pride is increasingly undeserved.
Last week I flew between Newark and Austin. As you may have seen on the news, the security lines were hours long and, in some cases, snaked out the airport doors and onto the street.
This wasn’t because of a protest or a strike, however, but yet another government shutdown, the third in just six months.
Starting in October last year and lasting for 43 days, we endured the longest shutdown in U.S. history due to an impasse over Affordable Care Act subsidies. Then, earlier this year, a partial shutdown over delays in a funding package linked to immigration. And now, going on more than a month, we’re in another partial shutdown over Department of Homeland Security funding.
The shutdown has meant about 50,000 Transportation Security Administration officers have been working without pay. Many have picked up second jobs, while others are calling in sick and more than 300 have simply quit.
Acting Deputy TSA Administrator Adam Stahl says we’re rapidly approaching a breaking point:
“If the call rate does climb,” he said of agents calling out of work, “there could be scenarios where we may have to shut down airports. This is a serious situation.”
You’d think Congress would want to fix this quickly in an election year, but all evidence to the contrary. Republicans and Democrats remain in a stalemate over DHS funding, with both parties blaming each other and using strikingly similar language to do so.
“Democrats need to end their political posturing, stop using our TSA agents as political pawns, and fully fund DHS,” said Sen. Katie Britt.
Sen. Raphael Warnock said, “I think it’s simply wrong for my Republican colleagues to use these hard-working Americans as leverage, as pawns, in what they are presenting as a false choice to the American people.”
But while both parties finger-point, all the average American sees is a dysfunctional government getting more dysfunctional by the day, with basic pursuits — like air travel — feeling more like capricious and unreliable luxuries.
While inching through security in Austin, someone asked me what the lines were about. “The shutdown,” I said. He didn’t even know we were in one again.
We deserve better from our government. But if this is just our new normal — where on any given day we’re left wondering what parts of our government are open and running — we may, like the French, need to get ourselves an app for that.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
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