Donald Trump’s government is increasingly authoritarian.
The president is launching pretextual investigations against his enemies, while providing pardons and military honors to the most violent of his friends. He is extorting news organizations for friendlier coverage and blackmailing law firms for pro bono services. He is unilaterally nullifying congressionally ordered spending and firing federally protected civil servants. He is asserting federal control of municipal police forces, so as to empower cops to “do whatever the hell they want.” And he is deporting longtime US residents without due process.
None of this is a mistake or an aberration. Since entering politics, Trump has told us — over and over — that he has contempt for democracy and the rule of law. Now, he’s assembled an administration dedicated to translating his autocratic impulses into policy.
Democrats want their leaders to do something about this. But the party can’t do much. It controls neither chamber of Congress and boasts only three allies on the Supreme Court. Its sole claim to federal power lies in its capacity to filibuster bills in the Senate: Under current rules, most legislation requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster; Republicans have only 53.
Democrats can therefore threaten to block Congress from passing a new budget, unless the GOP offers certain concessions. Failure to reach such a compromise would result in a government shutdown. The current budget expires on September 30, so imminent action is needed to avert a suspension of myriad public services.
Some liberals want Democrats to block such action, in the name of democracy. In the New York Times, Ezra Klein argues that his party should shut down the government, so as to force Republicans to enact curbs on Trump’s power.
Unfortunately, there is no reason to think this would work. The GOP is not going to defy its dear leader for the sake of reopening national parks.
There might still be a case for Democrats to shut down the government. But the point of such hardball tactics would be to improve the party’s odds of victory in next year’s congressional elections, not to secure new legal restrictions on Trump’s power. The latter are, for now, unwinnable.
Shutting down the government won’t make Republicans less authoritarian
In his Times column, Klein, a Vox co-founder, calls on Democrats to choke off government funding unless or until Republicans acquiesce to restrictions on Trump’s authoritarianism and corruption. In making this case, he distilled and amplified a pervasive line of thought among highly engaged progressives.
Klein is not certain what Democrats should specifically demand. But he offers a few suggestions: that ICE agents cease wearing masks when conducting deportations; that the Trump family desist from investing in foreign countries; that every agency employ an independent inspector general; and that career prosecutors in the Justice Department enjoy job protections, among other things.
His argument for this general strategy boils down to four claims:
Klein might be right about his shutdown strategy’s political benefits. It is true that Democratic voters are unhappy and the party’s fundraising is lackluster. A shutdown could satisfy highly engaged liberals’ desire to see their leaders fight, and thus galvanize a torrent of small-dollar giving.
The theory that a shutdown would embolden law firms, corporations, and universities to resist Trump is more speculative, but not obviously wrong.
It’s important to be clear, however, that Klein’s strategy has a roughly zero percent chance of achieving its official goal — forcing Republicans to put meaningful constraints on Trump’s power.
House and Senate Republicans are not going to disempower the leader of their party’s personality cult unless their own voters turn sharply against Trump. Thus, to achieve Klein’s goals, a shutdown wouldn’t merely need to shift public opinion, but radically transform it.
And there is no basis for believing that this is possible.
Yes, a shutdown would be an “attentional event.” But over the past decade, there have been scores of events that galvanized media attention on Trump’s authoritarian tendencies.
January 6 happened. Which is to say: Trump sicced a mob on the US Capitol in hopes of overturning an election. This was the dominant news story in America for weeks. Even some Republican officials criticized Trump’s behavior. Yet this did not persuade the US electorate — let alone, Republican voters — that Trump was too authoritarian to hold high office.
I don’t see any reason to think that a government shutdown would foment outrage over Trump’s illiberalism more effectively than January 6 did. The latter entailed a more spectacular and straightforward attack on democracy than anything Trump has attempted since taking office. And condemnation of it was largely bipartisan.
By contrast, a government shutdown over Trump’s power grabs would unite the GOP. And while a funding crisis would direct attention toward Democratic critiques of Trump’s autocratic excesses, it would also generate media coverage of government service disruptions, and the Americans harmed by them. And Democrats would likely receive some blame for this dysfunction.
Historically, shutdown instigators have struggled to make their arguments heard over the din of public discontent with their tactics’ consequences. As Bill Scher notes for the Washington Monthly, no shutdown has ever achieved its ostensible goals.
And Democrats actually have less leverage than past shutdown orchestrators have typically boasted. When Newt Gingrich’s GOP shuttered the government in 1996, it controlled the House. And the same was true of John Boehner’s Republican Party, when it shut things down in 2013. In both these cases, there was no way for the GOP’s opponents to fund the government without its consent.
Today’s Democrats lack such veto power. The GOP controls both chambers of Congress. Democrats only have a say over the budget process because the Senate GOP allows them to: At any time, 50 Senate Republicans could choose to abolish the legislative filibuster for budget bills. At that point, Trump wouldn’t need a single Democratic vote to enact his fiscal agenda.
Trump already opposes the filibuster. Trump budget director Russ Vought has called for a more partisan spending process. If a prolonged shutdown forced Senate Republicans to choose between bucking Trump’s base — or saying that the Democratic Party has left them no choice but to increase their own power — they would surely pick the latter option.
For these reasons, Klein’s moral argument for a shutdown is misguided: Democrats should not shutter the government merely to avoid “complicity” in Trump’s illiberalism. The party’s lawmakers have a responsibility to effectively counter authoritarianism, not to safeguard the purity of their own souls. There is no better way to fulfill that obligation than to win a landslide in 2026.
To the extent that Klein’s shutdown strategy furthers that objective, it is justified. But any analysis of his approach’s political utility must account for its likely endgame: If Democrats shut down the government in the name of curbing Trump’s power and then fail to do so — either because they folded amid Republican intransigence or because the GOP abolished the filibuster — will that keep the Democratic base enthused? Or embolden civil society to resist Trump’s coercion? The answer might be yes. But it’s hard to feel much confidence about that.
The case for shutting down the government over health care
For its part, the Democratic leadership has staked out a more modest demand: to reach a bipartisan spending agreement, Republicans must preempt imminent cuts to the Affordable Care Act.
Under Joe Biden, Congress increased subsidies for people who purchase coverage on the individual health insurance market. But that boost is set to expire at year’s end. If that happens, then the average ACA enrollee will face a whopping 75 percent increase in out-of-pocket health care costs, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Meanwhile, the number of Americans without health insurance would rise by more than 4 million.
In Bloomberg, Matthew Yglesias, also a Vox co-founder, argues that Democrats are right to center the funding fight on extending the ACA’s enhanced subsidies. But he also calls on the party to shut down the government over that demand, should Republicans reject it. As of this writing, it is not clear whether congressional Democrats are actually willing to take things that far, particularly in the event that the GOP offers a “clean” continuing resolution — a short-term funding patch that keeps all spending at current levels.
Yglesias’s case for a shutdown centered on health care goes like this:
This strategy makes sense — so long as it doesn’t work.
Democrats can’t coerce the GOP into curtailing Trump’s power. But as Yglesias suggests, they might be able to convince Republicans to delay a surge in insurance costs until after the 2026 midterms.
If Democrats succeed at that, however, they will undermine their own prospects of taking back Congress. Given the stakes of disempowering Trump, it’s not clear that securing a single year of enhanced ACA funding is worth marginally reducing Democrats’ odds of winning House and Senate majorities in 2026.
Thus, if Democrats are going to orchestrate a shutdown over health care policy, I think their demands should be more ambitious: The party should insist on permanently funding the enhanced ACA subsidies and rolling back Trump’s Medicaid cuts.
These are both unimpeachably popular positions. Given their combined fiscal cost, however, Republicans are very unlikely to consent to them. Thus, making these demands would probably force the GOP to take a high-profile stand against affordable health care.
If Democrats held their ground, Republicans might respond by abolishing the filibuster and ending the bipartisan budgetary process. But that process is likely doomed in the medium term, anyway: The Trump administration is already undermining it by claiming the authority to nix appropriations at will. In any case, getting Republicans to take extraordinary procedural measures — just to avoid making health insurance more affordable — seems politically beneficial.
In the improbable event that Republicans cave, meanwhile, the substantive benefits would probably large and durable: Democrats wouldn’t merely prevent millions of Americans from losing their insurance next year, but in perpetuity.
Granted, it’s conceivable that Trump might nullify his party’s health care concessions by impounding the relevant funds. To no small extent, Democrats are mulling shutdown precisely because Trump has tried to usurp Congress’s fiscal authorities. But this doesn’t invalidate a push for higher health care spending: Democrats could scarcely ask for a larger political favor than Trump singlehandedly — and unconstitutionally — throwing millions off their health insurance.
To defend democracy, Democrats must prioritize their crass political interests
All this said, I’m still not sure how Democrats should handle the funding fight. I see the case for a shutdown over health care, and am still open to the idea that Klein’s strategy would pay political dividends.
In its desperation for Democrats to do something, however, I think the liberal commentariat is being a bit cavalier about a shutdown’s downsides.
Letting funding lapse could disrupt myriad government programs — from FDA inspections to SNAP benefits to NIH grants. Doing so would also undermine public agencies’ planning (and thus, future efficacy), impose financial hardships on countless federal workers, and shave billions of dollars off America’s economic output. (It would not, however, halt ICE’s mass deportation campaign, since that agency’s operations are deemed “essential,” under the law.)
Further, past shutdowns have failed not only legislatively but politically. As Matt Glassman notes, public opinion has generally turned against shutdown instigators. I think Democrats have a stronger substantive case for shutting down the government today than Republicans have in the past. But Chuck Schumer’s party also has less of a democratic mandate than Newt Gingrich’s did in 1996 or John Boehner’s in 2013.
Last year, Americans gave the GOP control of the House, Senate, and presidency. Democrats can only hold up the budget process because of the filibuster — a rule that progressives have condemned as anti-democratic. Some voters may therefore ask: What right do Democrats have to dictate terms to the GOP, or hold the government hostage to their demands?
I think there are good answers to that question. But conveying them to the public amid outrage over suspended government services could prove difficult. Historically, “let’s just restore preexisting funding levels, reopen the government, and then argue about all this” has been an effective retort to every argument made by a shutdown’s orchestrators.
This time might be different. Preventing a spike in health insurance costs is an unusually popular cause. And demanding the president comply with the rule of law is an exceptionally modest request. Given the merits of the Democrats’ demands — and the restlessness of their base — forcing a shutdown may be the last of their bad options.
But the case for that view is strictly political. Democrats can’t meaningfully curb Trump’s authoritarianism until they amass more power. The right approach to the funding fight is thus whichever one maximizes the party’s electoral competitiveness — not that which minimizes its “complicity” in Republican misrule.
The post Democrats can’t save democracy by shutting down the government appeared first on Vox.
