Twenty Thoughts on the Government Shutdown

This essay was reprinted from Brian Beutler’s site Off Message. Subscribe here.^[1]

I’ve said my piece^[2] in several articles^[3] over the past many weeks^[4], detailing why Democrats should deny Republicans their votes to fund the government^[5], and how they should approach the standoff.

Well, Democrats have denied Republicans their votes, Republicans don’t have enough votes in their majorities to keep the government open on a partisan basis, and the government has, thus, shut down. Now that we’re here, I want to offer some further thoughts on how we’ve reached this point, what it means, and where Dems should go next.

1. At least insofar as it shows that Democratic leaders have become more responsive to their voters, who overwhelmingly want to see the party fight Donald Trump harder, I am glad we’re here in a shutdown, rather than raging at Chuck Schumer for surrendering preemptively once again.

2. But insofar as Democrats approached the funding deadline without a plan, cobbled one together clumsily and late in the game, and entered the shutdown in a confused posture that they are unlikely to sustain, I have serious misgivings about the terms they’ve set for the fight.

3. The confusion in their posture stems from the fact that the nature of public misgivings over the Trump regime stems from his dictatorial abuses, rather than quotidian policy disputes, but Democrats outsource their strategic thinking to pollsters and strategists who try to steer every crisis toward health care in knee-jerk fashion.

4. In short (and to repeat myself), as long as Democrats insist that their bottom-line demand pertains to extraneous health care subsidies, I suspect they will have a difficult time maintaining an upper hand in the determinative battle for public opinion. And that risks squandering their latest and perhaps final opportunity to either pull the country back from the brink of constitutional collapse or tacitly declare no confidence in the Trump regime.

5. The fact that the animating dispute in this standoff (as opposed to the health care dispute Democrats have tacked on to it) pertains to defending the Constitution (including the inviolability of the budget itself) makes this different from any earlier shutdown fight.

6. And that is what makes it winnable—it provides Democrats a principled posture that they can maintain until Republicans either yield or cut bait and abolish the filibuster.

7. Indeed, I think Democrats could stick to their guns indefinitely and persuasively by making the case that they can’t be asked to vote for a budget deal that Trump and the GOP have promised to violate. Pressing for germane concessions that tend to hold the president to his word and bring him closer into compliance with the law and Constitution is sustainable.

8. In reality, these aren’t even concessions. Trump is insisting that Democrats concede him the extraneous right to violate budget agreements! What Democrats can and should be asking for is a clean budget under regular order.

9. I use these terms—extraneous, germane, regular order—for the purposes of persuading Democratic elites that they should stake out different grounds for fighting, not because I think Democrats themselves should use those terms on the hustings. The whole idea is that they are likelier to win the battle for public opinion, and thus the legislative fight, if their argument is clear, ironclad, impossible to refute. No votes for lawbreaking, no votes for a deal Trump will break.

10. This is Matthew Yglesias’ formulation^[6], but it illustrates why I think Democrats have chosen a poor basis for this fight: It’s worth imagining the party defending its obstinance in the coming days and weeks. “We’re holding out to make Republicans fund health care priorities they oppose” is an argument that won’t carry the day in most fora. At some point, even people facing large premium increases will say, “Maybe you should debate this separately.” But Democrats could convene town hall events with furloughed government employees and hold this ground: “We are sorry and outraged that the consequences of this shutdown are falling on you, but Trump and the GOP are promising to renege on the terms of any budget agreement, and there’s just no way we can provide them our votes under those conditions.” They could even make that case on Fox News.

11. The best critic on the other side of this analysis is Josh Marshall^[7], who argues^[8], in essence, that we don’t really know enough to have strong views about how Democrats should prosecute this fight. There haven’t been enough government shutdowns to reduce the dynamics to theory. It may well be that the public blames Republicans for shutdowns no matter the underlying dynamics, because Republicans define themselves by hostage-taking, procedural hardball, and hostility to government. All else equal, blaming Republicans is a reasonable inference.

12. But I think he might come around if he ran the thought experiment in Point 9. In fact, I think you can spot a concession in his own argument. He writes^[9]:

There’s now a flurry of statements from GOP congressional leadership essentially saying, Democrats need to do the right thing, act responsibly. The White House is claiming it’s about ACA for “illegals.” If anything, this tends to confirm the folly of all these intricate and baroque arguments about how to win or argue or whatever else about a shutdown confrontation, whether you state explicit policy demands, or don’t state them or use subordinate clauses or the passive voice.

The past eight months have been about the White House and congressional leaders doing whatever they want, wildly violating the Constitution or—even by their own account—ignoring every norm or tradition about how government operates. And the argument or rationale has consistently been: We have the power. You don’t. Too bad. Brute force is not only Republicans’ own policy. It’s their own account of their own policy. It’s under “Sucks to be you” in the manual of parliamentary procedure. So Republicans have chosen the rules of legislative engagement. 

Now that Democrats, for once, have a cudgel, they’re supposed to be a pal(s) and help the Republican-only approach keep chugging along. That’s absurd, and Democrats should be saying as much. I don’t think many Talking Points Memo readers will disagree on this point. But beyond that, again, it’s a reminder that this was never going to turn on the fine points of argument: “Are you doing this to compel a policy choice extraneous to the budgetary vehicle? Begone with you, man!” No. That’s not it. It’s about pure power back-and-forth to be judged in the court of public opinion. Whether Democrats will come out ahead on that I have no idea. But this we know.

13. What are the correct terms of the fight if the fight started because 1) Republicans have been on a constitutional crime spree for eight months and 2) now insist that Democrats be constructive governing partners? How could the correct terms possibly be “We’ll sign off, but only if you repeal some unrelated legislation that passed the old-fashioned way”?

14. They can’t—as Josh notes, Democrats should be saying it’s “absurd” that Republicans want them to sign off on Trump’s lawlessness. But that’s precisely why the lawlessness should be the basis of the fight. Health care confuses things unnecessarily.

15. The Democrats’ position—taken at face value and against this backdrop—is in a real sense the opposite of what the moment demands: It suggests that they’ll tolerate more lawbreaking, just so long as Republicans soften the blow to American pocketbooks. Do that, and you can continue impounding and rescinding and dictatoring for another year.

16. Of course, I could be wrong; it could be that the vulnerabilities in the Democratic position aren’t fatal. Perhaps the public is primed to blame Republicans for shutdowns, and maybe that instinct will prove to be sticky. Maybe Republicans will agree to extend the health care subsidies and the shutdown will come to an end. I don’t think that outcome is very likely. But if we get health care subsidies without any new constraints on Trump’s abuses of power, I believe we will come to regret it, and I will continue to believe that my approach would have been wiser: that Democrats shouldn’t have rescued Republicans from the pain of their own policies, and that they should have insisted on a return to the rule of law when the leverage was there.

17. The good news is, Democrats wrote their own funding legislation, which, along with health care provisions, included smart measures that would tend to bring Trump closer to compliance with the law and Constitution^[15]. If and as the fight drags on, Democrats can shift their bottom line from health care to the integrity of the budget itself. I hope that’s what they do.

18. Of all the Democrats who’ve embraced the extraneous health care framing, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has done by far the best job squaring it with the ongoing rule-of-law crisis. But notice how she asserts that extending health care subsidies must be paired with measures to make the budget itself inviolable. Her case for subsidies hinges on Democrats winning both major concessions they’ve demanded.

19. I suspect that if Democrats win any concession at all, it’ll be one or the other, not both. If that’s right, you could imagine a politically optimal outcome in which Republicans concede that the budget must be adhered to as written—a victory for Democrats and the rule of law—while Democrats also get to say, “We tried like hell to get Republicans to reverse these health care cuts, but they refused.”

20. If Dems don’t shift their bottom-line demand, though, I fear they will eventually get worn down, lose, then point to defeat as a reason not to fight in the future, and not to listen to those of us who advocated for smart procedural hardball all along.

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