Without a budget agreement in Congress by Sept. 30 to fund the federal government, there will be a shutdown.
Many writers and thinkers on the left are arguing that Democrats should embrace a shutdown. It would be a strategic move, the thinking goes, in response to what they see as abuses in the ways that President Trump and his Republican allies have governed.
Matthew Glassman, a political scientist at Georgetown, wrote in his Substack newsletter, Five Points, that this approach is all wrong. He explained further in an interview with a Times Opinion editor, John Guida.
John Guida: You write that a strategic shutdown would be a “terrible idea.” In general, why are shutdowns bad politics?
Matthew Glassman: They don’t work. There have been a handful of shutdowns longer than a day in the modern era. In none of them did the party trying to leverage the shutdown win the concessions they were seeking and, in each case, they also lost the public opinion battle.
Their opponents simply demanded a reopening of the government while pointing out all the ways the shutdown was hurting federal workers and American citizens. Eventually, the shutdown coalition cracked, the government reopened, they didn’t win their policy major objectives, and they were worse off politically going forward.
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The post Q&A: ‘A Shutdown Is Simply a Counterproductive Response to Trump’ appeared first on New York Times.
