Consultant Roy Trenneman at Reynholm Industries explains reasons for failure.
After turning the government off for a record-breaking 42 days, Democrats turned it back on this week only to discover it had the same healthcare malfunctions as it had before the shutdown. House Democrats have since announced plans to try putting it in rice next time. The original plan — to shut the government off for a little while and then turn it back on without making any other changes — was concocted in response to the government’s inability to renew expiring healthcare programs for 24 million Americans.
“We know the government’s supposed to take care of its citizens, so this healthcare money not going through clearly showed that it wasn’t working right,” explained House of Representative Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “Those five —” referring to the five Democratic Representatives who broke party lines to let the Republican funding bill through — “turned it on sooner than we were planning. I thought we should have left it off for longer; like sometimes when you turn off your phone and then try to turn it right back on it doesn’t start booting up. Watch,” Jeffries continued to a CNN reporter, silently holding out his iPhone 15 while holding the power button down for fifteen seconds, sliding his finger across the screen to power it off and quickly pressing the power button again when the screen went dark. At this point, the two continued to watch the phone in uncomfortable silence, unbroken only by Jeffries saying “see, it won’t turn on” about ten seconds into what would be a forty-five second viewing of the blank screen.
The world’s top information technology experts have said that while the long-standing practice of turning governments off and on again should be attempted before contacting them, it is usually less effective when leveraged against Republican bugs. Roy Trenneman, an Irish IT coordinator for Reynholm Industries currently working on an investigation of a fire at a Sea Parks, explained that “I usually start by asking if they’ve tried turning it off and on again, but if that doesn’t work it usually means the problem is a right-wing majority.”
Right wing majorities are unlikely to be resolved with a shutdown because of the manner in which shutdowns are meant to stop viruses. Turning the government off exerts leverage on viruses by withholding paychecks from working-class government employees, allowing natural parks to founder and making travel harder for everyday Americans. As Trenneman put it, “the thing about hurting nature, working class people, that type of stuff, is that the right wing doesn’t really care.” Trennman was unable to give the Collegian any further comment, being called away by a coworker to help with issues of a “ruddy vampire in the flipping office.”
Congressional Democrats are now planning to attempt placing the government in rice, following rumors that the solution to America’s problems is to “drain the swamp.” “I don’t think there’s a drain in there per se,” explained Jeffries, “but I’ve seen them put phones that fell into swamps in rice on YouTube, and it fixes them. Currently, hundreds of pounds of rice are being delivered in dump trucks to Washington, D.C. in an attempt to do just that. The process will cost taxpayers $500 million dollars over the next year, and is projected to flood at least 300 city blocks of D.C.’s residential area, flooding thousands of homes with rice and rendering them uninhabitable.
Visual mock-up of what the next government shutdown could look like. Graphic by Jules Yang.
On the other side of the aisle, Republicans maintain that the efficacy of government shutdowns is unmatched. Mitch McConnell has gone on record several times saying that even turning himself off and on again has “worked wonders” for him, citing it as an effective strategy to get nosy reporters off your back. At press time, McConnell was staring into space and rebooting after being asked to spell “bee.”
