A man once appeared on Fox News’ morning show Fox and Friends to offer his opinion about an impending government shutdown over one of America’s perennial budget battles. He had a very clear idea of the problem and how it should be solved, telling the hosts:
Problems start from the top and they have to get solved from the top. The president is the leader, and he’s got to get everybody in a room and he’s got to lead…I really think the pressure is on the president.
The man was Donald Trump speaking about President Barack Obama in 2013.
That was then. After agreeing to meet with Democratic leaders this week to try to head off the looming shutdown next week, Trump decided it wasn’t worth his time. In a long diatribe on Truth Social he claimed that unless the Democrats dropped a dozen demands they hadn’t actually made (“transgender operations for everybody!”) he would not meet with them. So much for presidential leadership.
According to Politico he was actually asked by the GOP congressional leadership not to meet with them as he’d planned. I would guess that’s almost certainly because they were afraid TACO Trump would make some kind of cockamamie deal that would put their members in jeopardy. The last thing you want to do is let Trump be alone in a room with anyone. He is so scattered and undisciplined you just never know which way he’s going to go.
Trump has always believed that government shutdowns would be good for him so he appears to have washed his hands of the matter. GOP elected officials know better. Politico reports that they are badly divided on the best strategy to handle the fact that the Democrats seem to be strangely united and unwilling to bend. They don’t have any practice in dealing with such an unusual phenomenon.
One side, led by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, wants to keep everything simple by saying that the Democrats are refusing to sign on to a clean continuing resolution to extend the budget negotiations (again) for another seven weeks. The idea is to portray the Democrats as being unreasonably obstructionist. The other side, led by House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to scream bloody murder that the Democrats are angling to reverse laws that give undocumented immigrants government benefits. I assume they each have their polling and focus groups backing up their strategies but at this point they’re just drowning each other out.
I made the point a couple of weeks ago that one of the main reasons Democrats were belatedly awakening to the fact that there is no margin in accepting handshake agreements or assumptions of good faith by the Republicans is the fact that the former author of Project 2025 and current Director of Office Management and Budget, Russell Vought, had basically thrown bipartisanship in the garbage and set it a fire when he promoted the highly controversial use of “pocket rescissions”, to unilaterally claw back spending that had already been signed into law. Vought went ahead and did it, using this contested mechanism to cancel $5 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid, proving that nothing will stop the administration from going back on its word.
Vought made clear how he feels about bipartisanship with these comments to the Christian Science Monitor last July:
“The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan. I actually think that over time, if we have a more partisan appropriations process—for a time—it will lead to more bipartisanship,
That last line brings to mind a comment by anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist years ago who famously said about Democrats, “they will only become acceptable once they are comfortable in their minority status. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.” It is an article of faith among many Republicans that once Democrats learn to accept their permanent minority status they will happily do as they are told.
Last week Vought decided to deploy yet another scare tactic by ordering all agencies that are not considered “essential’ in a shutdown to prepare to permanently fire employees if the Democrats don’t bend to his will. This was a fear expressed in the last shutdown by Sen. Schumer but that was back in the early days of the DOGE purges and the Capitol was still a bit shell shocked. Today, nobody is cowed by threats of mass firings since they have been doing it for months. It doesn’t take a shutdown to give them the green light to fire anyone they choose.
Moreover, their mass firings have proven to be resounding failure. They are reportedly desperate to reinstate many of those who were dismissed and have actually wasted massive amounts of money due to the lack of necessary staff to keep the government functioning. Vought can fire everyone if he wants to and new cases can wend their way through the courts but there is no reason for the Democrats to make a deal with them to stop it since they just lie and do what they want anyway, no matter the cost.
It’s taken a while for Washington Democrats to accept that this is now the operating principle of the Republican Party. But they appear to understand it now. They are demanding that the Republicans restore the health care cuts that were in the Big Beautiful Bill which includes those massive cuts to Medicaid and the Obamacare subsidies that are going to hit millions of Americans very soon. They know that the Republicans are already feeling heat for what they did and it’s only going to get worse for them going into the mid-terms if they have to face more angry constituents in a shrinking job market who are losing their health care.
I don’t know how this is going to end up. The Republicans still hold the institutional power and I would never underestimate the willingness of some Democrats to delude themselves into believing that their fellows on the other side of the aisle are operating in good faith. But so far, they are holding the line. After all, Democrats have a base too, which is overcome with horror at what the Trump administration and its congressional toadies are doing to this country. They may not win in the end but the 263 million people in America who didn’t vote for this travesty deserve to have someone in Washington fighting for them.
Update: So Trump now says he’ll meet with the Democratic leaders on Monday. I guess someone told him that it made him look like a loser and a quitter to refuse to do it. The word is that he’s going to tell them to go fuck themselves. Really.