How long government shutdown 1995

Whereas Gingrich expected the public to side with the Republican Party during the dispute, opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans felt that the impasse had been the result of Republican obstinacy.

However, the government shutdown demonstrated the costs of divided government and, more importantly, shifted the political discourse to the right. Although the budget deal restored many of the Republican's proposed cuts in domestic spending, Clinton adopted a more centrist position for the remainder of his presidency.

Clinton's move to the right was exemplified in his State of the Union Address of January 27, , in which he declared that "the era of big government is over. And some other company volunteered security guards. So I kept the lights on the Christmas tree, which might have been the wrong political decision. It might have been better to turn them off. Q: What do you recall about the dynamics of those meetings?

Did you ever get the sense that the President was second-guessing whether this was the right thing to do? Rivlin: It was a very odd time.

I found the Administration position very hard to defend because I thought that we should be moving further in the direction of budget balance. I remember there were two of us on one side of the table and four of them. You make this presentation.

They probably should have rejected it. So I did—we were in negotiation at that point—I said what our offer was. The meeting went on for a little while, but it broke down. They rejected it, and we went back to the White House. Remember this was a revolution, and there were revolutionaries who had been elected based on the Contract for America. I honestly think that deep down Newt Gingrich understood that this was probably the wrong thing to do. But I think to a large extent his hands were tied because he had created this group of members who really believed that their mission in life was to get their budget adopted, to get their contract adopted.

And because they had been elected on that basis, they would lose the momentum if they capitulated at this point. So I think they deeply believed that they were going to show to the country just how deeply they believed they were right by shutting down the government. And also I think this is not a group of members that ultimately believes in the role of federal government anyway.

To some extent, yes, shutting down the federal government, so what? But also at that point Dole was running for president. The shutdown ended after 21 full days -- from December 16, to January 5, And it did so only after Clinton bowed to a key Republican demand: submitting a seven-year balanced budget plan scored by the Congressional Budget Office.

The public blamed the Republicans. It wasn't the only shutdown during the Clinton administration. An earlier one lasted five days, from November 14 to November 19, She ended up being sent to the West Wing to help answer thousands of phone calls that were overwhelming White House operators.

While Lewinsky was walking to her desk on the evening of November 15 , Clinton motioned her into the empty office of George Stephanopoulos, his senior advisor. He asked her several questions about herself, and Lewinsky ended up telling him that she had a little crush on him. Clinton then asked Lewinsky, an unpaid intern who worked for him, if she wanted to go into his private office with him—actions that many now regard as an abuse of power.