Is it time for another government shutdown showdown already? It was just five months ago that we went through the last one, and a few months before for the previous one. Each time the best the Congress could do was to vote for a resolution to continue the existing budget for a few more months to keep the government up and running while they perform this tiresome ritual that never seems to have any resolution.
The parameters of the debate this time are little different than they were back in March when they agreed to extend the budget until September 30th. Once again, what the Republicans are proposing is so odious that Democrats cannot be seen to have voted for it lest their own voters turn on them. Even after the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Catastrophe”, which cut taxes for rich people and safety net programs for everyone else while adding hundreds of billions to Trump’s already fat federal police apparatus, they are coming back for more.
The Republicans have a tiny majority in the House which means they cannot lose more than a small handful of votes or they have to negotiate with the Democrats which, in the Trump era, is akin to committing treason. But the fact is that their own right wing, best exemplified by the House Freedom Caucus, has often held out for even more draconian cuts requiring a few Democratic votes to pass a bill. This has, at times, given the House Democrats some leverage but with the decline of the Freedom Caucus’ clout in the second Trump term, the GOP has pretty much stuck together leaving House Democrats on the sidelines.
However, the Republican majority in the Senate has to contend with the filibuster which means the Democrats could, in theory, force a shutdown all by themselves. Last March, that’s what Democratic voters were clamoring for when Minority Leader Chuck Schumer inexplicably worked to round up votes to defeat the filibuster, infuriating the base and many of his own Senators. Cory Booker, D-N.J., even called him out for it during his epic 24 hour speech on the Senate Floor.
The question is whether these same dynamics will play out this time. Will the Democrats put up a bit of a fuss before allowing the budget to pass without resistance or once more kick the can down the road? There’s already talk of an extension to November or December mainly due to the fact that with holidays scheduled at the end of the month there are only 14 legislative days to get anything accomplished. Politico reports that Republicans, who do not want another CR are “livid their own leaders don’t have a better plan.”
The Senate Democrats are another story. They have apparently been negotiating with the Republicans over the past few months to try to hammer out some kind of compromise and getting nowhere. But it’s already clear that the Republicans are not acting in good faith. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, has pulled the trigger on his plot to usurp the power of the purse from the Congress by asserting that the president has the right to cancel congressionally approved spending by using what they call a “pocket rescission.” This basically means that the administration waits to spend congressionally mandated money programs it doesn’t approve of so that it will expire at the end of the fiscal year without Congress being able to do anything about it. This is not something any president had ever done before and it should be declared to be unconstitutional unless the Supreme Court wants to fully extend the presidency to total monarchical power.
Under those circumstances why should anyone sign on to a deal with the Republicans when their president will simply refuse to honor it? This is, of course, something that the whole world is confronting with Trump routinely reneging on treaties and agreements, even those he signed himself. There is no reason to believe that any deal struck with Donald Trump is worth the paper it’s printed on.
The consensus among the political establishment is that the Democrats will end up caving in the end, pretty much saying they shouldn’t even bother to put up a fight. Politico even published a story this week headlined, “Democrats Flinched During the Last Spending Showdown. They Should Do It Again.” It quotes a Democratic staffer :
“You’ll probably just have to eventually fold and get nothing out of it,” the aide said, warning the scenario posed huge risks for the party: “Are we going to let the base dictate legislative strategy and just shut down the government so we can say, ‘Okay, at least we fought,’ and then two weeks later, we reopen it and get nothing in return, and in the interim do harm to actual people?”
This appears to be the attitude of the Democratic leadership. Schumer and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries sent one of their strongly worded letters to the GOP leadership which asked:
1. What is your proposal to fund the government in a bipartisan manner and avoid unnecessary harm to the American people?
2. Are there any plans to address the looming healthcare crisis caused by Republican policies, including the so-called “One Big Beautiful Law”?
3. Has the President or any member of the Trump Administration indicated to either of you that the Office of Management and Budget will submit another rescissions package?
Journalist Brian Beutler points out:
The leaders make no demands. The closest they come is to request a meeting, in the hope of getting answers to these questions. Not to establish conditions for Democratic votes, just to see how uncompromising Republicans intend to be. This is, if anything, a weaker posture than they adopted in March, before folding and igniting an enormous grassroots backlash
He points out that Republicans always make maximal demands in these stand-offs and managed over the years to get Democrats to back down repeatedly. (In fact, if their Freedom aucus extremists hadn’t refused to take yes for an answer, many times they could have gotten almost everything they wanted.) He writes, “All it took to establish a new, unwritten rule that Republicans would use governing deadlines to extort Democrats was for then-Speaker John Boehner to walk to the mics and make an arbitrary demand: A dollar in spending cuts for every dollar increase in the borrowing cap.” The Senate would follow up with the threat of a filibuster and Democrats would end up capitulating.
By failing to use these same tactics, Democrats get nothing. They get no demands met because they didn’t ask for anything. Instead they are quizzing Republicans about bipartisanship which is simply meaningless. And they aren’t using the moment to define the real parameters of the debate on their turf. Beutler recommends this, for example:
“As you know President Trump is engaged in a wide variety of illegal activity, including his seizure of Congress’s spending and tariff authority, his abuse of other emergency authorities, and his deployment of masked, secret police throughout the country. We of course can not vote to fund the continuation of this lawlessness. Should you need Democratic votes to renew funding for the government, we will insist upon amending the appropriations to include measures defunding these historic abuses of power.”
If they prefer, they could use the same tone and demand the reinstitution of all the funding for their proverbial “kitchen table issues.”
Democrats have voters too and they need to see the party in Washington making some trouble for the Republicans even if it’s risky. We are living in unprecedented times and it calls for bold action. Instead of worrying obsessively about offending some swing voter a year from now, perhaps they should, as Ed Kilgore writes in NY magazine, ” begin thinking of the federal government not as turf to be defended to the last ditch but as territory occupied by a proto-fascist regime and take some pride in interrupting its operations until normalcy returns.” Why make it easy for them?
Salon
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