Key takeaways
- Though Democrats felt they were winning the politics of the shutdown fight, they’d made no progress on their specific substantive demands
- The only plausible endings to the shutdown were Democrats caving or the GOP abolishing the filibuster; Trump wasn’t making concessions
- With shutdown pain ramping up, and Democrats fearing a world without the filibuster, key members of the party cut a deal
After forcing the longest US government shutdown in history, Senate Democrats threw in the towel Sunday night.
Eight Democratic senators voted with the Republicans Sunday to advance a deal to reopen the government, even though the deal includes no significant concessions from the GOP or President Donald Trump.
The turnabout came as a shock to many highly engaged online progressives, who had believed their party was “winning” the politics of the shutdown fight — meaning, polls showed more people blamed Trump than Democrats for the shutdown’s impact.
So, to many on the left, a cave like this — which on its face just involved eight Democrats, but is widely believed to have won the tacit assent of many others in the caucus — seemed infuriating and inexplicable.
But the reality is that Democrats never had a plausible strategy to get what they said they wanted — an extension of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies — out of the shutdown fight. And after 40 days, they may have been winning the politics of the shutdown, but they had made no apparent progress toward getting Trump and Republicans to give into their substantive demands.
Indeed, rather than negotiate, Trump has in recent days started pressuring Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster — removing the tool Democrats used to cause the shutdown, and letting the GOP pass laws with the party’s votes alone. Senate Republicans initially stuck by their refusal to do this, but the longer the shutdown stretched on, the more the pressure on them would intensify.
Furthermore, the pain caused by the shutdown for ordinary Americans was about to ramp up. Federal workers have already been going without pay since last month, but SNAP beneficiaries were now losing benefits and air travel was about to become a nightmare due to FAA cuts.
So for some Democrats, this combination of lacking a path to achieve their substantive demands, fearing the consequences of filibuster abolition, and worrying about increased pain caused by the prolonged shutdown spurred them to cut a deal.
Many among the party’s base are apoplectic, urging a continued fight. But, for the Democrats, this was always poor turf on which to battle. As I argued in September, Trump and the GOP were never going to cave here — and the only ways in which this could have plausibly ended were the GOP abolishing the filibuster, or Democrats caving. We got the cave.
Why Democrats weren’t going to win a shutdown negotiation — and why they tried it anyway
Democrats decided to pick this shutdown fight for one basic reason: the party’s base believed they weren’t doing enough to fight back against the Trump administration.
The last government funding showdown, back in March, ended with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and key Democrats backing off from their threats to force a shutdown, and the base was furious. They calculated that they couldn’t do that again; they had to at least try a shutdown this time.
So, much like congressional Republicans did back in 2013, they settled on an ultimatum strategy. They would not support government funding, they said, until the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies were extended. (In 2013, Republicans’ demand was that the Affordable Care Act be repealed.)
But the ultimatum strategy is a terrible way for a minority party to achieve its goals in Congress.
An ultimatum sparks off a highly polarized fight in which, if the majority gives in, it would be seen as a humiliating cave — handing over policymaking authority to the minority. So the majority has powerful incentives not to give in to hostage-taking like this, since if they do, more hostages will surely be taken in the future.
What’s more, the majority party does have an ultimate trump card: If the minority’s obstruction continues long enough, the majority can simply change the rules, in this case by eliminating the filibuster.
Some commentators argued that if Democrats held firm, they could win the war of public opinion and therefore bring Trump to the table. But Trump has long had low approval ratings and won’t face election again. And he’s obsessed with maintaining his political brand for toughness and savvy negotiating, so he always seemed particularly unlikely to respond to an ultimatum from Democrats with a cave — he’d rather dig in.
All of this was obvious to Democrats in advance. But they felt they had no other option but to please the base by giving it a try.
They did — for 40 days. In that time, their polling improved, they drove increased media attention to the expiring ACA subsidies, and they did well in last week’s elections.
But none of this seemed to drive the president or the GOP toward making policy concessions. Indeed, the only movement from Trump was that he got increasingly vocal that Senate Republicans should get rid of the filibuster.
The “make Republicans abolish the filibuster” gambit, explained
So, lacking any way to force concessions from Trump or Republicans, the real choice facing Democrats was: Do they cave, or do they hold out indefinitely until the GOP abolishes the filibuster?
There is a strain of thinking among progressive commentators that forcing Republicans to abolish the filibuster to reopen the government would have been good, actually.
The high-minded version of this argument is that ending the filibuster is good for democratic accountability, since it lets the majority party pass its agenda.
But the more ideologically self-interested argument is that progressives think the filibuster is typically more of a problem for them than it is for Republicans. They’re dreaming of what they might be able to pass the next time Democrats retake the presidency and Congress, and they’d love the filibuster to be out of their way.
This argument lands oddly at a time when there is such concern about Trump’s authoritarian inclinations. The filibuster has been one of the most powerful constraints on what Trump can actually do in office; it essentially prevents the GOP from passing new laws (except through the convoluted budget reconciliation process).
Trump, for his part, seems to badly want this guardrail on his authority removed, saying last week that there’s “so many things” he could pass if not for filibuster restrictions. Senate Republicans, though, seem to share progressives’ belief that this would be bad for the GOP in the long term. (Or, perhaps, they’d like to keep the filibuster around as a handy excuse to tell Trump they can’t do this or that thing he wants.)
Regardless of what you think about the impact of filibuster abolition, the reality is that Senate Democrats were not at all united around a deliberate strategy of forcing the GOP to get rid of the filibuster.
The other reality was that the shutdown is not all an abstract political game — it was causing real and increasing hardship for many Americans. And the current Democratic caucus was not hardline enough to keep that going forever.
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