Most political struggles are peppered with exaggeration and half-truths, but usually the rhetoric is not saturated with things that are just not true.

Government shutdowns are not rare. The House has often used its “power of the purse” to try to force changes in policy and even major programs. To say otherwise is utter nonsense.

Wikipedia should never be the last place you look for research, but it is a great place to start. This article on US government shutdowns lists the 18 times this has happened since 1976, with enough detail to present a pretty accurate picture of how normal a “shutdown” is.

Let’s stop painting this shutdown as something that has never happened. It has.