The government shutdown that began at 12:01 a.m. is the sixth such closure in the past three decades. It was easily the most foreseeable.
That congressional Democrats would force this confrontation became clear almost from the moment they ducked a clash over spending with Republicans in March. Back then, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer convinced just enough of his members that a government shutdown would empower President Donald Trump to govern even more heedlessly and punitively than he already was. The blowback was intense. Rank-and-file Democrats—and even some party leaders—accused Schumer of surrendering one of the party’s only remaining levers in Washington without a fight.
The springtime uproar ensured that Democrats would make a tougher stand this time, and now government offices across the country will close and federal employees will stay home without pay. Many could lose their jobs if the Trump administration carries out its threat to use a shutdown to supercharge its slashing of the workforce. But the political outcome for Democrats might be just as disappointing.
They have no more power to extract concessions from Trump than they did six months ago. Democrats find themselves in the same unenviable position that Republicans were in during the Obama years, when they routinely took the government’s funding (and, at times, its credit rating) hostage to pick fights that party leaders knew they could not win. The GOP provoked a shutdown in 2013 to deny funding to the Affordable Care Act; a dozen years later, Democrats have forced a shutdown to ensure that it continues. Schumer and his House counterpart, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are demanding that Republicans agree to extend enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of the year; without congressional action, insurance rates would rise for millions of people.
As an issue, focusing the spending debate on health care makes political sense for Democrats. This is favorable terrain for them, and they are trying to prevent a painful spike in costs for consumers across the country. “The fact of the matter is that if we don’t address this, people are going to lose their health insurance,” Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told me.
Some congressional Republicans also want to extend the subsidies, both to protect their constituents and because they fear the electoral blowback of a rate increase during next year’s midterms. But GOP leaders correctly point out that the deadline for the health-care funding is not for another three months; the stopgap spending bill they’ve proposed runs for just seven weeks and is designed to buy time for the parties to broker a broader budget deal that could include the ACA subsidies.
Democrats want to force Republicans into negotiating a health-care agreement now. (They also want the GOP to roll back the Medicaid cuts that it enacted in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” this summer, but those demands are considered even less likely to bring results.) “If the Republicans think that we will fold for any [spending bill], then Democrats will have no leverage in trying to push for any of our priorities in government funding,” a senior Senate aide told me, describing the party’s thinking on the condition of anonymity.
A final effort to avoid a shutdown yielded no breakthroughs and seemed to be largely for show. Trump convened the bipartisan congressional leadership at the White House on Monday, and afterward both parties retreated to their talking points. Democrats implored Republicans to address a health-care “crisis,” and Republicans, who themselves had voted repeatedly for government shutdowns, denounced Democrats for doing the same. A few hours later, Trump posted on Truth Social a vulgar AI-generated video depicting Jeffries, who is Black, wearing a mustache and sombrero, with fabricated audio of Schumer speaking.
Congressional Democrats are—for now—mostly unified. Just one of the party’s members in the House, Representative Jared Golden of Maine, broke ranks to vote for a continuing resolution that would have averted a shutdown. In a shift from earlier in the year, lawmakers say they’re done basing their decisions on the fear of how they might embolden or empower the president. “I don’t buy the argument that if the government shuts down, that allows Trump to be a dictator. I just don’t buy that,” Pallone told me.
Yet few in the Democratic Party are making confident predictions of success. For some, the decision to make a stand over health care is not so much a smart strategy as it is the only one available. When I asked Jim Manley, a former aide to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and a veteran of shutdown fights, to assess the Democrats’ chances, he asked if he could be quoted shrugging. “It is what it is,” he said rather glumly. “Sometimes you’ve got to play the card you’re dealt.”
How long a shutdown might last is unclear. The government closed twice during Trump’s first term. A shutdown instigated by the president over border-wall funding dragged on for 35 days; the one that Democrats provoked lasted just three. In the final days before this week’s deadline, Schumer reportedly floated a compromise that would have kept the government open for another week or 10 days—rather than the seven weeks proposed by Republicans—to allow for talks about health care.
Both Republicans and progressive Democrats quickly panned the idea, but it suggested that, once again, Schumer might not be as dug in as others in his party are. In the Senate, some Democrats seem willing to claim victory as long as Republicans agree to negotiate an extension of the ACA subsidies, but Jeffries and House Democrats are demanding that a renewal be written into legislation before they vote to reopen the government. In an indication of the lingering differences among the party’s caucuses, Democratic Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada, along with Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, sided with Republicans in a failed vote to keep the government open hours before the shutdown began last night. Of the three, only Fetterman had defected in an earlier vote on the same measure, and Republicans would need to pick up just five more votes to reach the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster and reopen the government.
Democrats face an inherent disadvantage in shutdown fights, Manley said. “We have a real problem here because Democrats believe in governing, and Republicans do not,” he said. Still, Manley urged party leaders not to be intimidated by Trump: “Every Democrat, including the squishes, needs to understand that this president is unpopular, becoming more unpopular by the day, and is pushing wildly unpopular proposals. This is not some 800-pound gorilla.”
In letting the government close and risking an even more aggressive assault by Trump on the federal workforce, Democrats have shown they’re ready for a fight they avoided in the spring. What’s less apparent, however, is whether they’ve started one they can win.
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