In March, Democrats led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer shrank from confrontation under the threat of a government shutdown. Now voters’ growing disenchantment with President Trump and the unpopularity of the megabill he pushed through gives Democrats a chance to fight and win as another funding deadline looms.
By demanding action on popular policies, Democrats could execute a delicate maneuver where they avoid blame for a shutdown while benefiting from the negotiations to end it.
There are risks to denying Republicans the 60 Senate votes necessary to approve the big appropriations bill, but the risks of avoiding that clash are greater. Backing off to avoid a shutdown would depress the Democratic base and signal capitulation to an increasingly authoritarian regime.
One instructive precedent comes from the 1995-96 shutdowns, which are now mostly remembered as the time when President Bill Clinton began his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
A year earlier, hard-charging right-wing Republicans took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Their wide margins gave them far more running room than the G.O.P. has now. A battered Mr. Clinton later pleaded with reporters that he was still “relevant,” which sounds a lot like today’s congressional Democrats.
Yet when the shutdown ended in early 1996, Mr. Clinton had won big. How? Mr. Clinton, who had struggled to communicate a message, boiled down his dozens of wordy policy positions to what his aides called “M.M.E.E.” — Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment. Intense focus on those four popular Democratic positions powered Mr. Clinton’s shutdown comeback and his re-election that fall.
The Clinton analogy is imperfect; Mr. Clinton had the megaphone of the presidency while Democrats today control no branch of government. The politics of a shutdown favor them nonetheless.
Democrats have a big edge on what’s seen as the No. 1 problem in America: affordability. According to a new CBS News poll, a paltry 36 percent of Americans approve of the way Mr. Trump is handling inflation, a blaring sign of the president’s vulnerability on the main issue that brought him back to the White House.
In a world of short attention spans, Democrats should go to the ramparts on just three instead of four issues, with a tightly focused popular solution for each.
Today’s version of M.M.E.E. should be H.T.T. — health, tariffs and troops in the streets. The first two are directly related to affordability, with health-care premiums and drug costs surging and tariffs causing steep price increases, not to mention resentment from parents who don’t want the president telling them, as he did in April, that it’s OK if they can now afford only two dolls for Christmas.
On health, Democrats should demand an extension of the popular tax credits that make Obamacare more affordable for millions of Americans, which are scheduled to expire next year. They should insist on restoring funding for popular National Institutes of Health grants, particularly for cancer research. And in the glare of a shutdown it would be tough for Republicans to resist a Democratic push to reverse at least some of the unpopular Medicaid cuts. Finally, Democrats should insist on a provision guaranteeing the availability of vaccines, a position supported by 78 percent of adults in a recent NBC News poll, including overwhelming majorities of independents and Republicans.
On tariffs, Democrats should demand that almost all tariffs be approved by Congress, a view that might soon also have the backing of the Supreme Court. This would peel off some Republican senators who like neither tariffs nor Mr. Trump trampling on the legislative branch’s longstanding authority over trade.
On troops in the streets of major cities, Democrats should demand the restoration of Mr. Trump’s $500 million cuts in aid to local law enforcement and fund thousands of new officers while they’re at it. They could effectively argue that it’s better to spend money preventing crime than having troops pick up cigarette butts on the National Mall (as Military Times reports). And Democrats could fight to cut funding for military deployment in cities, in line with the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement. This, too, would be popular; a majority of voters oppose bringing the National Guard into cities. Blunting one of Mr. Trump’s authoritarian power moves would lend constitutional gravitas to what is otherwise a familiar tussle over appropriation levels.
All of this could be pursued while establishing that the president cannot rescind appropriations without congressional approval, including a filibuster-proof Senate vote.
While Democrats won’t win in all of these areas, an ambitious strategy will yield more than a cautious one born of overestimating Mr. Trump’s political strength.
Tactically, Mr. Schumer should seize on the budget director Russell Vought’s rash claim that a bipartisan approach to appropriations is unnecessary. That gives Democrats in both chambers an excuse to walk away from talks and force Senate Majority Leader John Thune to abolish the filibuster if he insists on carrying every bucket of Mr. Trump’s water. Mr. Thune is unlikely to do so out of understandable fear of what would happen when Democrats someday regain control. After Republican-only efforts to keep the government open fall short, the shutdown and all the suffering and inconvenience it brings can be blamed more easily on Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump’s inevitable ranting about newly assertive Democrats is unlikely to be enough for him to prevail. Voters already think there’s too much bully in his bully pulpit. While the CBS News poll shows 47 percent approve of his “goals,” only 37 percent like his “approach.” That doesn’t bode well for his management of a shutdown. Democratic strategists are brandishing other polls showing that an overwhelming number of voters would blame him and congressional Republicans for any shutdown, as they did in the record-long 35-day shutdown in 2018-19.
And if Mr. Trump vetoes the appropriations bill, extending the shutdown, he’ll just tick off the millions of Americans who use government services in hundreds of ways, further weakening Republicans heading into the midterms.
Adopting this targeted strategy means, alas, that most of Mr. Trump’s grievous assaults on the Constitution and basic decency cannot be remedied right now. And fatalists argue that any agreements in the Senate would be meaningless; Mr. Trump will just continue to break the law.
But that should not deter Democrats from at least trying to do their duty. They should heed the advice that the retired Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. offered to Franklin D. Roosevelt when he took office in 1933, amid a crisis of democracy: “Form your battalion and fight!”
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