Oh come on. This is partisan hackery. This "theatre" did in fact cause vital government functions to shut down. I was personally on a project where I had to stop work because our checks were sitting on a table in Washington and a major milestone meeting was canceled because the government was furloughed and would not be there, throwing the entire project schedule off. This was replicated thousands of times across the economy.

Even the ghost of a chance of going down to the wire as to whether a bond payment would be missed by a single day on US obligations, is in itself tremendously disruptive. The economy is structured around U.S. debt as being the safest paper there is. Don't downplay just how dangerous dicking around with this for partisan points was.