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.
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The post Clinton-Era Lessons for Democrats Confronting Trump appeared first on New York Times.
