The Shutdown Is Here. Will Democrats Be Blamed for It?

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The government went into shutdown late last night as Congress failed to pass a funding bill before the midnight deadline. What does this mean for you? Well, planes will soon start falling out of the sky, and all nuclear bombs will soon self-detonate. Sorry, confusing it with Y2K. It means that all non-essential government functions will cease operation until a funding bill is passed and signed into law.

Now that we’re here, how does a shutdown end? It hinges in part on a tedious but important political ritual known as the blame game: Which side’s spin about how the other side “shut down the government” carries the day in public opinion. Once one side has been effectively tagged with responsibility, they’ll scurry for a way out.

The contours of this shutdown are similar to those in the past, but with a key twist: a role reversal between the two parties. Specifically, this time, it’s Democrats who are trying to force a policy change by withholding support for keeping the government open. That has traditionally been a Republican tactic. But this time around, Democrats are under enormous pressure from their base to do put up a fight against an extreme and erratic administration.

That sets this shutdown up to be a political experiment that answers a long-running debate: Is the party making the policy demand always the one that the public blames, and always the one that has to fold? Or does muscle memory ensure that Republicans are more likely to be blamed than not?

That muscle memory goes back to the first marquee shutdown of the modern era: The 1995-96 showdown between Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton. In that shutdown, Republicans shouldered the blame after insisting on deep budget cuts that Clinton wouldn’t accept—while Gingrich was portrayed^[2] in the press as a cry baby throwing a fit of pique.

The next shutdown, in Oct. 2013, stemmed from hard-right members in the House and Senate insisting that the implementation of Obamacare be either delayed or defunded in a government funding bill. While Obamacare wasn’t popular yet,^[3] the Republican position was ludicrous—you’re not going to fund the government unless President Barack Obama cancels his landmark, eponymous policy achievement?—and Republicans folded after 16 days.

In early 2018, Senate Democrats filibustered^[4] a funding bill that didn’t resolve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration program. That led to a brief shutdown over a weekend and into Monday before Democrats got the willies. They accepted face-saving assurances from then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

And for 35 days between December 2018 and January 2019, the government shut down because President Trump refused any funding bill without money to build his treasured border wall between the United States and Mexico. Trump was blamed, agreed to reopen the government, and declared a national emergency to secure border wall funding to protect his pride.

So: Republicans have gotten the blame for most shutdowns for the simple reason that Republicans have been mostly responsible for them. Going by past shutdowns, the public doesn’t think it’s worth it to shutter^[5] national parks, monuments, and general government services for individuals and businesses, in order to secure a partisan demand, whether or not that demand is popular. The party that’s united around a neutral extension of funding without partisan bells and whistles—known in the jargon as a “clean” bill—comes out on top.

And that makes this the Opposite Day of shutdowns.

Here, Republican leaders in both chambers are offering a clean extension of funding for seven weeks while negotiators continue work on a long-term budget. Democrats are resisting, demanding a permanent extension of expiring COVID-era Obamacare subsidies.

That, at least, is the paper reason for the impasse. The true impetus behind Democrats’ negotiating position is pressure from the base to have a negotiating position at all. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer faced an unprecedented public lashing for caving during the last funding battle in March. He was under dire pressure to “do something” this time. This is what he’s come up with.

Under the rule of thumb that the party making the policy demand loses a shutdown fight, then, it’s only a matter of time before Democrats cave. Republicans need only watch them squirm. Despite how gung-ho Senate Democrats might publicly present themselves about this battle, these fears are squarely front of mind for them. They know how they’ve won shutdowns in the past, and they know how they would lose this one.

That rule of thumb, though, has never been properly tested with the roles reversed.

Consider the one shutdown that Democrats did instigate before: the 2018 one over DACA. It was so brief—just a few days, with most of it taking place over a weekend—that public opinion didn’t have time to fully bake. Democrats caved quickly because they were in a losing position, and they feared they would get the blame for a protracted shutdown. But they never got far enough along to know for sure. The preliminary polling that was conducted in those few days showed that blame was spread around^[7] pretty evenly^[8]—if not tilting more^[9] in Republicans’ and Trump’s direction.

A government shutdown is chaos, after all, and who’s responsible for most of the chaos in Washington over the last decade? And which party, by the way, controls each branch of the federal government right now?

So what’s the endgame here? If the science of past shutdowns holds, Democrats will hold out just long enough to release the pressure coming from their base, and then find a way to cave with dignity. If the public figures that Trump and Republicans have shut the government down as usual, negotiations over health care subsidies could commence.

But then there’s a world where the two arguments collide into a wash. It seems harder than ever for Americans to find consensus on anything, so why should we expect consensus on “who shut down the government?” Don’t be surprised, then, if public opinion hews almost exactly along partisan lines or closely mirrors Trump’s approval rating, and we’re in for a protracted shutdown.

This may be the first shutdown, too, in which the politics of it all take a backseat to the power grab that takes place during it. The White House is looking for more than just a good run of headlines about how it won a shutdown fight over Democrats, something that will be well forgotten ahead of midterms. Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought sees^[14] a shut-down government as a rare policy opportunity to further shrink the size of government and eliminate ideologically inconvenient bureaucrats while Congress is off the job. “You all know Russell Vought,” Trump said on Thursday. “He’s become very popular recently. Because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn’t do any other way” during a shutdown.

Who’d be forcing the policy change then?

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