RAMESH PONNURU: Get Rid of U.S. Government Shutdowns Forever.

There’s no law of nature that requires the federal government to run at partial capacity when Congress and the president can’t agree on a budget bill. Long ago Congress could have passed, and a president could have signed, a law stipulating how the government would operate in case of such a disagreement.

Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio has been trying for years to enact such a law. During the last shutdown, in 2013, he got a floor vote on an amendment for an “automatic continuing resolution.” If no appropriations bill were signed into law, the affected programs would keep running at their existing spending levels for the next 120 days. If no bill had passed by then, spending would be cut by 1 percent. Another 1 percent cut would be made every 90 days after that.

The amendment was defeated on a nearly party-line vote, with Portman’s fellow Republicans supportive and the Democrats opposed. Senator Barbara Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who at the time ran the Appropriations Committee, made two main arguments against the idea.

The real solution to shutdowns, according to the former senator, was not to change the budget rules but to agree on time to appropriations bills. She added that Portman’s idea was not just unnecessary but dangerous. It would be “draconian” to let those 1 percent cuts compound.

Every cut, no matter how small, is draconian. And every increase, no matter how large, is inadequate.