Shutting Down Shutdown Talk

In Slate on Friday, John Dickerson flatly dismissed the idea of a government shutdown. The prospect (as GovExec's sister site Nextgov reported last week) that federal employees and possibly even congressional staff could lose access to their BlackBerries was just too horrifying to comtemplate, he wrote.

Tongue less firmly in cheek, Dickerson laid out another simple reason a shutdown is unlikely: Neither Democrats nor Republicans really want it. The White House "cannot have a government shutdown while the economic recovery is still so fragile." And Republicans "can't risk having their first big public act be that they shut down the government."

Dickerson's case is bolstered by recent reports of movement in budget negotiations between the two sides. Still, when 56 percent of Democratic insiders say they think they would win in a shutdown scenario, and Newt Gingrich argues Republicans wouldn't lose this time around, its certainly not out of the question that the two sides could take this debate right over the brink.