Republicans are left with a few more months of Biden-era spending levels and another health-care debate they have no idea how to win.
It won’t be over until both houses pass a bill and the president signs it, but it sure looks like the path toward ending the shutdown has been paved.
The Senate has approved a continuing resolution that funds the government through January and reinstates the federal employees fired during the shutdown. It also starts the process of Senate passage of three full-year appropriations measures that would fund defense, veterans programs, and the agriculture department. And it comes with a promise to hold a vote in the Senate (but only in the Senate) on an extension of the expiring Covid-era Obamacare subsidies.
This is basically an offer that John Thune made to the Democrats a month ago. It looked from that moment like the most plausible framework for ending the shutdown. But the Democrats apparently had to put the country through some pain before they could bring themselves to accept it.
In this respect, the Democrats are playing out a coalitional logic that Republicans are all too familiar with. This is just the set of pressures that Republican congressional leaders have encountered when confronting Democratic presidents since about 2011. Their activists — and the members of their conference most inclined to perform for those activists — are under the misimpression that the country is one frustration away from rebelling against the other party, and they think that sparking a fight will launch that rebellion and bring the president they detest crashing down. A government shutdown is almost the only means they have for sparking such a fight, and so they hang their hopes on it without thinking through whether and how it could actually be turned to their advantage. Once the fight begins, it is the leaders of the party who started it who turn out to be the ones really facing pressure, and eventually they lurch toward surrender.
The politics of this ridiculous pantomime is not quite as stupid as it seems, though, because the outcome is actually what the activists and their favored members of Congress implicitly wanted. This was the hardest point for Republican leaders to wrap their heads around in the Obama years: You just have to accept that many party activists and some politicians need to be to the right (or, in the case of the Democrats, to the left) of whatever is the ultimate outcome. It is not in their interest to be part of the solution, so you have to move forward without them and recognize that a situation that allows them to say they didn’t get what they wanted actually is what they wanted, and so is what you need to produce.
Chuck Schumer does seem to have recognized this in the end, although his own “no” vote on the deal constitutes a refusal to take honorable ownership of his leadership position in this situation. It is a disgraceful failure of responsibility.
To the extent that this kind of strategy is a miscalculation on the part of progressive activists and politicians, and not just pure cynicism, it is a miscalculation rooted in the assumption that public pressure will break the other party’s will. Since at least the struggle over Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the 1990s, both parties have wasted a lot of time and energy waiting for broad public outrage to blow a wind at their backs. But that outrage doesn’t really materialize.
That’s less because voters aren’t angry than because neither party is now well situated to care much about outrage from the other party’s voters, and neither is well equipped to parse outrage that doesn’t come from either party’s base. The only outrage members of Congress really care about now is that of their own primary voters. That’s also why last week’s off-year election results didn’t move Republicans to give any ground. The voters they’re geared to listen to didn’t really say anything.
This is evident even in the endgame we are witnessing now. This shutdown is not ending because Democrats are worried that voters are getting upset. It’s true that some centrist Democratic senators have concluded that the party’s strategy wasn’t getting anywhere. But even more than that, they seem to have been moved by concern that Republicans might blow up the filibuster and the appropriations process. It was an inside concern more than an outside concern that has brought the shutdown to a close.
That also suggests that the filibuster may well be more durable than some conservatives fear it is. President Trump has been pressing Republicans to end the shutdown by killing the filibuster in the last few days. The sheer bottomless idiocy of the idea of ending the filibuster to pass a continuing resolution has meant that people trying to reinforce Trump’s doltish haranguing have needed to look for other arguments against the filibuster than the one he was making. And the one reached for by most (like the vice president) is that the Democrats will surely end the filibuster the next time they have a chance, and that they didn’t do it last time only because of opposition from a couple of senators who aren’t there anymore.
This is not a foolish argument, and it may turn out to be true. Creating the impression that the filibuster might be in danger was also useful to Republicans, as I’ve just suggested. But the end-game of this shutdown suggests that (as usual) the filibuster has more friends than we might imagine. The Senate’s supermajority requirement is an important protection for the most moderate members of the majority coalition—the ones on whom majorities generally depend. The two such moderates who stood at the rightward edge of the Democratic Senate majority in the last Congress are indeed gone, but there are others behind them, and by definition, there always will be, in both parties. The logic of the filibuster will appeal to them, too. Some of them were evident in the Republican resistance to Trump’s call to kill the filibuster, and some were also evident in the group of eight Democrats who voted to end the shutdown.
And maybe more importantly, the filibuster has yet again proven to be an effective catalyst for modest bipartisan legislative agreements. The idea that we would be better off if major legislative initiatives were to swing back and forth between the parties like major executive initiatives do just doesn’t add up. As Michael Fragoso wisely argued around here, Republicans need to decide what would be the right thing to do now, not what Democrats might do in the future.
So has this been a wipeout for the Democrats? Are the activists steaming at Chuck Schumer right? I think they’re not entirely right, and this is one way in which the Democrats have used a shutdown more effectively than Republicans did in the Obama years. Although they have gained nothing of legislative substance here, the Democrats have raised the subject of health-care policy in a way that may well endure through the midterms. Health care is the only significant policy issue on which Democrats are now more popular than Republicans, and they have made real progress this month toward making it a prominent election issue next year.
If they can keep it central, and especially if they can harness it to a broader set of cost-of-living arguments, the Democrats may well have a strong case for themselves in the midterms. Republicans in the Trump era have no real answer to the cost-of-living challenge, and it is a problem that could decimate their already narrow and fragile coalition.
President Trump is down to about 40 percent approval at this point, and this month’s off-year elections suggest Republicans are already losing the support of key segments of the electorate that returned him to the presidency. Fundamental economic and cost-of-living concerns are at the heart of those troubles, and if such concerns intensify, the GOP could be in very serious trouble. The administration shows no sign of grappling with this challenge, and congressional Republicans are barely grappling with anything at all.
In a confrontation they had no real shot at winning, the Democrats may well turn out to have been quite right to just use the modest leverage they had to change the subject to health care, even without the prospects of any substantive gains in the near term. After all, Republicans haven’t gained anything either. They are left with a few more months of Biden-era spending levels and another health-care debate they have no idea how to win.