On the menu today: This is the 28th day of the federal government shutdown; the longest government shutdown in U.S. history was 35 days in 2018 and 2019. As yesterday’s newsletter noted, flight delays at airports are stacking up, and on Monday the largest federal employee union urged Democrats to agree to a continuing resolution to reopen the government. On November 1, none of the roughly 42 million Americans who get food stamps that arrive every month on their electronic benefit transfer cards will get that aid. (Whether or not you think all 42 million Americans receiving food stamps need them, some inevitably do; to qualify, a person must have gross income below 130 percent of the federal poverty level. More on federal poverty levels below.)
You might think that all this would mean that negotiations to end the shutdown were intensifying. But apparently, nothing is happening on Capitol Hill. Chuck Schumer and the Democrats will soon face a question of whether they’re willing to shoot a hostage.
Who’s Willing to Shoot the Hostage?
Whether or not you like the term “hostage taking” in the context of government shutdown fights, one side is withholding support for a continuing resolution to reopen the government, hoping that the bad consequences of the shutdown will force the other side to make a policy concession.
In 2021, Democrats — and only Democrats — passed the American Rescue Plan Act, which created “enhanced premium tax credits” for purchasing health insurance on the exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. “Obamacare.” That law temporarily expanded eligibility for premium subsidies to individuals with incomes above 400 percent of the federal poverty line, meaning there was no upper income limit. (For perspective, this year 400 percent of the federal poverty line is $62,600, and for a family of four is $128,600.)
The American Rescue Act also increased the available subsidies. As the Cato Institute notes, “Because health care premiums vary greatly by age, location, and household composition, subsidies can now reach households making hundreds of thousands of dollars, so long as they live in areas with sufficiently high exchange premiums.”
But all of this was temporary, Democrats explained, a short-term generous handout to help Americans deal with the effects of the Covid pandemic.
In 2022, Democrats — and only Democrats — passed the Inflation Reduction Act. That legislation extended those “enhanced premium tax credits” through 2025. But again, Democrats insisted, it was just temporary assistance to get through hard times.
About 24 million Americans buy insurance through the ACA/Obamacare exchanges, and about 92 percent of those receive premium tax credits.
Today, Democrats want these “enhanced premium tax credits” made permanent.
Last year, the Congressional Budget Office calculated that extending this credit for a decade would cost $415 billion in direct costs from the subsidies, a $48 billion increase in interest payments from higher deficits, and $25 billion in spending for other programs.
That’s $488 billion, or almost half a trillion dollars. That’s the Democrats’ price to “release the hostage.”
Because this kind of move will blow up the deficit and debt, Democrats want a Republican-run House and Senate to make them permanent, even though Democrats chose not to make these tax credits permanent when they had the chance in 2021 or 2022.
And so far, 44 Democratic senators are willing to keep the government shut down to get it.
Since the shutdown began, the U.S. Senate has voted on a continuing resolution to reopen the government twelve times. Each time it has had the support of just about every Republican senator. (Senate Majority Leader John Thune often votes “no” because somebody on the winning side of the cloture vote — in this case, the side voting against cloture — has to file a “motion to reconsider” if the matter is to be taken up again.) Democratic Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and independent Senator Angus King of Maine have also voted to end the filibuster and consider the continuing resolution. But in the U.S. Senate, you need 60 votes to end the filibuster and cut off debate.
For the side that wants the policy concessions and is not willing to vote for a continuing resolution — in this case, obviously, indisputably, and incontrovertibly the Democrats — the pain is the point. The pain is the pressure that will make the other side give up and offer the policy concessions. If you’re the hostage-taking side, you want the pain to be as bad as possible.
So if you’re a Democrat, you want to see headlines like, “Six ways the shutdown is about to get worse.” You want people nervous to get on an airplane because they hear about personnel shortages at air traffic control centers forcing ground stops.
The regular operation of the government, and the paychecks for all those federal workers, are the hostages, if you like that metaphor. The problem is that Senate Democrats have taken a hostage that Trump and the Republicans aren’t all that motivated to rescue.
And the largest union of federal workers is getting tired of all this. “As president of the American Federation of Government Employees, I represent over 800,000 federal and D.C. government workers who serve with pride and professionalism,” Everett Kelley declared in a statement Monday. “It’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures, and no gamesmanship. Put every single federal worker back on the job with full back pay — today.”
The country’s largest union of federal government employees taking the Republican position is not what most people expected to see in this shutdown, or perhaps ever.
But, at least for now, there’s no sign of additional Senate Democrats voting to reopen the government. From CNN:
Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who represents a large population of federal workers, said of the union’s statement, “I work very closely with them. That matters to me. But the issue that I’ve always been focused on, that I’ve shared with y’all is, is a deal, a deal? And the AFGE would not want us to cut a deal and then have Trump fire a bunch of people next week. If we cut a deal and then he did that, they would come to us and say, ‘What the hell were you guys thinking?’”
Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper said, “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I can’t remember a situation where I felt there were less palatable choices.”
But he still doesn’t feel ready to vote to reopen the government like AFGE is asking. “I don’t feel comfortable with that, because I’m not convinced that, you know, sacrificing whatever it is, 30, 35 million people, who are going to either lose health care or pay dramatically more for it is worth that extra week, but it’s tough. Trust me, it’s a hard calculus to figure out.”
Well, that’s why they pay you the big bucks, senator. (Hickenlooper, who co-founded a brewery, has a net worth estimated at $30 million; he makes $174,000 per year as a senator.)
Oh, and senator, keep in mind that you get paid during the shutdown, but every staffer around you does not, which may explain why morale in your office seems to be getting worse each week. So, if you declared that you weren’t ready to reopen the government yesterday and your aides didn’t burst into spontaneous enthusiastic applause, now you understand why.
I’ve used the metaphor of marching into a box canyon before. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, desperately needing to look like a tough guy who can stand up to Donald Trump, has maneuvered his party into a situation where the Democrats (a) self-evidently are the obstacle to reopening the government, and (b) need the pain of the shutdown to get worse in order to sway the minds of Republicans to spend a half-trillion over ten years to keep giving subsidies for buying health insurance to people who are making in excess of four times the poverty level.
In situations like this, it is always wise to study the classics. In season five of 24, when Jack Bauer needed a duplicitous double agent named Henderson to tell him the location of some stolen nerve gas canisters, he recognizes that threatening to shoot Henderson in the kneecap isn’t going to make him talk. Instead Jack shoots Henderson’s wife in the leg. (Alas, Henderson is such a ruthless SOB, he doesn’t talk even after his wife has been shot.)
Now, as violent and desperate as Jack’s action was, it did represent a sharp, calculated gamble on what Henderson valued and what kind of pressure would make him give up the location of the nerve gas canisters. (It was also one of the rare times on 24 when torture didn’t work.)
There is no “nice” version of a government shutdown, unless you want to count a brief one. Inevitably, federal workers face financial stress from missing one or more paychecks, even if they know they’ll get back pay when the shutdown ends. Firefighters at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi didn’t do anything to deserve this. Nor did the nonprofit Breathing Association in Columbus, Ohio. TSA workers in Mobile, Ala., shouldn’t be forced to sell their plasma or get gigs as Uber drivers. It is morally wrong that “hundreds of service members have reported receiving incorrect pay or no pay at all during the mid-month pay cycle — and so far, none of those discrepancies have been corrected.” If you run a coffee shop near Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colo., a bunch of your regular customers just aren’t going to be coming in as frequently. Blue Ridge Parkway maintenance employees in North Carolina shouldn’t be scrambling to find temporary work.
But as laid out above, government shutdowns are exercises in political pressure and leverage. These are the consequences that the Democrats voluntarily signed up for the first time they chose to vote against the continuing resolution.
If you’re not willing to hurt people, you really shouldn’t get into government shutdown fights.
ADDENDUM: We all knew that former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had all the sharpness of a bowling ball, and that her White House memoir was going to be a litany of implausible excuses and spin. As expected, her book tour is going quite badly.
In an interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, she contends that Joe Biden had a good shot of winning the 2024 election if he had stayed in the race; that Democrats don’t stand up for “the L.G.B.T.Q. community”; that she has no concern, even to this day, that Joe Biden could serve as president through January 2029, even though he’s currently getting radiation therapy for prostate cancer and turns 83 next month; that Biden performed well in the post-debate interview with George Stephanopoulos in which the president said he couldn’t remember if he had watched his own debate performance; that it was an insult that people wanted a primary instead of automatically nominating Kamala Harris and that at the same time, Jean-Pierre “never really believed Harris could win”; and concludes by accusing Chotiner of speaking “for the Democratic leadership” in his questions.
Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic posted on X, “This is an interview that should inspire some follow-up reporting: how was KJP hired for her job in the first place?”
Really, pal? Really? You can’t think of any possible way that someone who begins every sentence with “as a Black woman who is part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community” ended up getting hired for a job she couldn’t perform in a Democratic administration?