The short answer is yes, the people doing it (congress) need to be the ones to fix it. That’s what the constitution says.
The medium answer is that voters need to hold their elected officials accountable. On the Democratic side, which is the only side that makes a reasonable effort at controlling spending, that means dealing with politicians who seem to be beholden to corporate interests. On the Republican side, that means not rewarding politicians who live in an alternate reality while fighting a nonsense culture war.
The long answer is that 200+ years of various motifs on “get money out of politics” has failed, and voters should shift focus to eliminating wealthy people and corporations so they can’t fund bad policy anymore.
The meta answer is – if Obama were taking drastic actions to hold up spending, threatening to shut down whole departments via executive order, hoping like hell to be backed up by activist judges, how would the right (and you) react? Everyone is guilty of being a principled idealist when it suits them, and encouraging our leaders to work outside of the system when it also suits them. But man… the right’s ability to flip back and forth between these two mindsets at the drop of a hat is exhausting. Do you actually want elected officials and unelected bureaucrats to support and defend the constitution of the United States like their oaths dictate they do? Or do you just want a dictator who will do whatever you want them to do?
And he shut down government doing it in 1995. Which goes back to my assertion that the President has influence over Congress. The buck stops at the desk of the President. Presidents have always created their version of the budget as part of the process.
That is a curious way to characterize an impasse created by Newt Gingrich refusing to negotiate on budget priorities, refusing to raise the debt limit, and openly threatening to shut the government down if President Clinton didn’t unilaterally accede to Republican budget cuts. Gingrich later credited that his opposition and the government shutdowns with the reelection of a GOP majority in both houses of the 103rd Congress, although it should be noted that Clinton was also reelected to the Presidency, and in general polling indicated that the public saw the Congressional Republicans as being more responsible for the shutdowns than Clinton.
The Office of the President submits a budget to Congress. It rarely survives materially intact even when the president’s party is in control of Congress, and in a case of an oppositional Congress, it is generally just ignored for whatever compromise the House has worked out and that will be reconciled with whatever the Senate comes up with. Clinton briefly had a line item veto that did grant him some real control over what portions of the budget were enacted but the Supreme Court (rightly) found that to be executive overreach and nullified it.