The popular way of describing what’s going on in Washington right now is to say that on October 1, the federal government shut down as a result of Congress’s inability to pass an appropriations bill to keep it funded. Chief among the sticking points was the fact that Democrats and Republicans could not come to terms on the future of Affordable Care Act subsidies. The Republican bill did not include them; Democrats balked at signing their name to a budget that would cause skyrocketing premium costs for millions of mostly low- and middle-income Americans.
You wouldn’t be faulted if that was your capsule summary of the shutdown. It’s essentially the story to which most of the political press is sticking, and there’s nothing fundamentally untrue about it. It would appear for now, in fact, that the broad public acceptance of this state of play is boosting Democrats’ fortunes in the game of who “owns” the shutdown. CNN’s Harry Enten reported this week that voters blame the GOP more, by an average of 12 points, and he noted that historically speaking, the party blamed at the outset is who gets blamed at the end. (It probably helps Democrats’ cause that those perusing the Obamacare exchanges for plans right now are already seeing the huge spikes in premium costs.)
Still, these facts only tell part of the story. This government shutdown isn’t merely about an appropriations bill, and it’s not entirely about health care subsidies. This shutdown is actually the culmination of a much deeper dysfunction, to which blame can indeed be wholly attached to President Donald Trump and his GOP apparatchiks. But the underlying cause of the shutdown is tricky terrain for Democrats to negotiate, and it calls into question whether they can—or even should—speedily resolve it. And the key to understanding the problem begins with acknowledging that this didn’t start in October. The government shutdown began a few weeks after Trump was sworn in.
Trump’s second term is broadly defined by his monomaniacal desire to either end or fatally impair the federal government. With the help of Elon Musk and Russell Vought, the Trump administration managed to do this in the most alienating possible way. As my colleague Alex Shephard noted this week, the administration’s slash-and-burn speedrun through the civil service has been broadly unpopular. It also probably goes a long way toward making any of the GOP’s rhetoric about Democrats being to blame for this most recent shutdown harder to take seriously.
But the reason things have dragged to a legislative standstill in October is essentially because Republicans in Congress willed it to be so when they returned to Washington to rejoin Trump as devoted supplicants. Their most fateful decision in that regard? Giving up one of the legislative branch’s core functions—the power of the purse. As NPR reported, by the first week of February, Republican lawmakers had already begun to master the art of explaining away why they were happy to surrender the power to appropriate money to Trump.
I characterized this at the time as an escalation in GOP lawmakers’ expansive campaign of self-abnegation. But it has ended up being so much more. The decision to give the White House full power to decide what, when, and how congressionally appropriated money is spent has created an impasse more deep and intractable than the shutdown itself, because the question of how the conflict over Obamacare subsidies gets resolved has become impossible to answer.
Let’s think about it for a minute. The White House’s position, as advanced by Vice President JD Vance and others, is that Senate Democrats should stop filibustering the appropriations bill now, and the matter of the subsidies can be negotiated later. The problem is that it’s impossible for a reasonable person to view that offer as sincere. Sure, Congress can go through the motions: meet in committee, hash out a deal, pass a bill, and send it to Trump’s desk. Trump can even sign that bill. But none of it matters when you know that Trump is likely to simply appropriate or not appropriate that money as he sees fit through pocket rescissions.
What we have here is a fully busted appropriations process; it is impossible to have faith in anything that Trump and his Republican cronies do with taxpayer dollars, even in instances in which bills have been negotiated, agreed to, and passed. And Republicans just keep on tipping their hands that they don’t really care about restoring that faith. This week, the chief way they responded to Democrats’ demands was to threaten federal workers’ back pay, despite the law being very clear that workers are entitled to those wages once the shutdown ends. Here, Democrats should say, “If the Trump administration is willing to break faith, and the law, to not pay you now, there is no reason to believe your steady paycheck is safe under any circumstances.”
So when and how does this get resolved? Knowing of the Trump administration’s faithlessness and the physiological impossibility of him honoring any deal made on Obamacare subsidies—or anything else—it’s not clear that Democrats should even play a role in resolving the matter. As Garrett Graff wrote, “If appropriations bills are not seen as enforceable contracts, why should any Member of Congress vote to fund any part of the federal government under Donald Trump? You’re voting to provide money for lawlessness.” Having once opted to give Trump’s paramilitary forces the money to invade American cities, Democrats should not position themselves to be fooled a second time.
It’s worth pointing out that Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress, so they can end the impasse any time they want, all on their own. I’ll admit that I do not know what Devil Magic has heretofore kept the GOP from simply nuking the filibuster and getting on with this. Perhaps they desire even the slightest whiff of bipartisan assent for Trump’s designs because of the cover it earns them from the mainstream political media, who are as desperate as ever to find the smallest scintilla of evidence that the American experiment is still working. But from here, the shutdown calculus becomes simple: If Democratic votes are what Trump and his GOP enablers need the most, they must never be provided.
The post Why It’s Pointless for Democrats to Negotiate a Shutdown Deal appeared first on New Republic.
