SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
We're joined now by NPR senior political contributor Ron Elving. Ron, thanks for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: Have we reached the point in U.S. politics where both major parties feel they have to permit a government shutdown rather than compromise to avoid it?
ELVING: That seems to be where we are, Scott. And in this case, the majority of Republicans are simply saying they have nothing to negotiate. You know, there were people who set all of this up 250 years ago - the constitutional framers. They saw compromise as being close to the essence of governing. That meant compromise between individuals, between regions, between the House and Senate, between Congress and the president. But they could not envision the current environment. They did not deal with political parties or even mention them in the Constitution itself. But parties soon formed, and at times, they introduce another layer of conflict on top of others. For all this to work, there needs to be some kind of understanding that at some point, we are all on the same team, all serving the same country, the same voters. And right now, that is what is being sacrificed in a world of social media.
SIMON: For American voters who watch all of this go on, does it look like anybody's looking out for them - people who depend on government to work?
ELVING: For many, it feels like they have been relegated to an afterthought or made a kind of battleground. Millions of others have decided that one party or the other or one faction of a party or one single individual is their champion, and no one else cares or matters. And that, of course, just deepens the partisan divide, makes compromise all the less likely. You know, Ronald Reagan was a strong conservative, but he made a point of distinguishing between an opponent and an enemy. That has not been the approach favored by President Trump.
SIMON: On Friday, Defense Secretary Hegseth said that he'd ordered another strike on a small boat in Venezuelan waters that he said was carrying drugs. The Trump administration says the United States is in, air quote, an "armed conflict" with cartels. Is this, by legal definition, any kind of war?
ELVING: It is a kind of war by political definition rather than legal. Trump can call it a war and use the weapons of war, but there has been no kind of war declaration from Congress and no clear means of adjudicating the accusations or seeing the evidence the government says it's acting upon. Some of us remember what was called an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam in 1964. That became the pretext for escalating the U.S. presence in that part of the world - Southeast Asia - until half a million Americans were serving there and the country itself was increasingly convulsed over it.
SIMON: Course, on Tuesday, Secretary Hegseth and President Trump spoke to top military commanders that they had gathered at Quantico. What stood out to you about these proceedings?
ELVING: It's hard to think of a precedent for bringing the top officers of the Army and Navy from their bases around the world to receive this kind of lecture from their highest-ranking civilian leaders - the president and the secretary of, well, war, which is a rebranding of the Defense Department by the Trump administration. Trump's speech was 70 minutes of rambling stream of consciousness that at times sounded like a campaign rally. Hegseth seemed mostly interested in physical fitness for senior officers in uniform and repudiating diversity as a goal in military promotions. The bottom line seemed to be that there is a new sheriff in town, and he's got orders to redefine what the military is for and whom it is intended to serve.
SIMON: Let me chance to return to something. Do you see the shutdown ending middle of the week?
ELVING: No, I don't. I don't think it is necessarily going to shut down until there's more desire to - excuse me. I don't think it's going to end as a shutdown until there's more evident desire on both sides to have it end.
SIMON: NPR senior political contributor Ron Elving. Thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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