Shutdowns

As of midnight, there was a partial government shutdown.  At Vox, Dylan Matthews writes of previous shutdowns:

Government shutdowns are familiar to most Americans, but they’re a relatively recent development. They are the result of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Since then, Congress has failed to authorize funding for the federal government on 18 separate occasions. The first six of those didn’t actually affect the functioning of government at all. It wasn’t until a set of opinions issued by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti in 1980 and ’81 that the government started treating “funding gaps”— periods when Congress has failed to allocate funds for the ongoing functions of government — as necessitating the full or partial shutdown of government agencies.

At Business Insider, Bob Bryan writes: " This is the first time that one party has controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House during a shutdown in which federal employees are furloughed."