A few months ago Democrats seemed to be gearing up to shutdown the government. House Democrats were pushing hard in that direction and in mid-March Sen. Schumer said Senate Democrats were unified.
“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort but Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input — any input — from congressional Democrats. Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR,” Schumer said on the floor, calling for a one-month funding bill that provides more time to negotiate a deal.
“Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11 CR that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass," he said. ""I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday."
As you probably remember, it all fell apart as the deadline approached. Just a few days later, Sen. Schumer reversed course and voted with Republicans to prevent a shutdown. The party's base was furious with him, with some demanding his resignation. Schumer made the media rounds defending his choice.
Schumer said a "shutdown would have been the greatest disaster," putting the government in the hands of "evil, nasty, nihilistic people" like Musk, President Trump and OMB Director Russ Vought.
"We would have had half the federal government we have now," Schumer said. "So I thought I did the thing a leader should do: Even when people don't see the danger around the curve, my job was to alert people to it — and I knew I'd get some bullets."
The continuing resolution that Schumer helped pass in March will expire at the end of this month. That means Democrats are once again facing the same problem. Do they side with Republicans to keep the government going or do they shut down the government to make a point? And if the latter, what is the point exactly?
Yesterday, Ezra Klein at the NY Times has written an argument in defense of shutting down the government this time around. Klein says he didn't think doing this in March would have made sense. Looking back, he believes Schumer had the stronger argument at the time, even if the base of his party hated it.
I talked to Schumer, to House leadership, to members of Congress with different theories of what should be done. I didn’t think it was an easy call. The House’s argument — Hakeem Jeffries’s argument — was that a shutdown creates a crisis. A crisis creates attention. And attention gives Democrats the chance to make their case, to be heard by the American people.
The argument Schumer made was threefold. First, Trump was being stopped in the courts. There were dozens of cases playing out against him, and he was losing again and again and again. Shut down the government, and you might shut down the courts.
Second, DOGE was trying to gut the executive branch. When the government falls into a funding crisis, the executive gets more authority to decide where the money the government does have goes. In that chaos, DOGE could go further and faster.
Third, the market was quaking at the threat of Trump’s tariffs. Trump had promised a strong economy and low prices, and instead he was creating chaos. If Democrats triggered a shutdown at the exact moment Trump was creating an economic crisis, they would confuse who was to blame for the chaos — was it Trump or them? It’s the first rule of politics: When your opponents are drowning, do not throw them a lifeline.
But now, according to Klein, things have changed. Now he thinks a shutdown is probably the best option Democrats have. Why? His answer, essentially, is that Trump is winning or at least not losing the way Democrats hoped. [emphasis added]
Not a single argument Schumer made then is valid now. First, Trump is not losing in the Supreme Court, which has weighed in again and again on his behalf...
Schumer’s argument in March was that the courts were stopping Trump; let them do their work. What we can say in September is that no, John Roberts is not going to stop Donald Trump.
Second, the scale of DOGE’s assault on the government has shrunk. Trump and Elon Musk went through a messy and public breakup. But the real reason it didn’t continue, I suspect, is that it’s Trump appointees running these agencies now...
Third, the markets have settled into whatever this new normal is, at least for now. Trump’s tariffs are unpopular, but what damage they have done to him politically they have already done or they will do over time, as price increases squeeze Americans. We are not in a recession. The economy is not in chaos. Democrats cannot stand back and hope the markets will do their work for them.
We'll come back to that bit in bold in a moment.
So the answer to why Democrats should do this now is that Trump didn't fail. He's winning and the chaos Democrats predicted hasn't arrived. At this point, Klein shifts gears to a moral argument about why Democrats need to go further this time. He says Trump is creating is an autocratic government which must be stopped. I won't go over all of his arguments but the one he mentions the most (five times) is the presence of masked ICE agents in American cities.
We’ve watched Trump deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles and then to Washington, with more cities expected to come under federal military occupation soon. We’ve watched masked ICE agents conducting raids all over the country, refusing to reveal badge numbers or warrants.
The issue of masks is one Democrats have been complaining about for months. When ICE agents were making raids in California, Mayor Karen Bass made similar complaints. California and some other states are attempting to make the use of masks illegal but at present DHS says the goal is to prevent its agents from being doxxed.
Federal officials say the face coverings help protect ICE agents from being doxxed, or having personal details like a home address or contact information shared online.
Democrats are hypocrites on this issue of course. They have always resisted limits on masks when the people wearing them are Antifa militants or pro-Hamas campus extremists. In May they even published a story explaining why campus radicals wear masks.
In interviews, a dozen student demonstrators across the country cited the risk of being doxxed by pro-Israel groups accusing them of antisemitism, featured by news media or captured in viral videos. Several were intimately familiar with the torrent of online harassment, rescinded job offers and death threats that can follow.
That story was mildly critical but certainly seemed to understand why students wanted to avoid the "torrent of online harassment" that was sure to follow if they revealed their identities. The same is true for ICE agents who are individuals doing a job (as opposed to radicals breaking the law and or campus rules). ICE agents don't deserve the kind of vile and violent harassment we all saw directed at Elon Musk and Tesla a few months ago.
In any case, putting aside the why part of Klein's argument, it's interesting to return to the question of how this is supposed to help. What exactly does Klein hope Democrats can accomplish by shutting down the government? He says the goal is to gain attention for their message. But what is that message exactly? He's not sure they have one or, for that matter, anyone who can deliver it.
Right now, Democrats have no power, so no one cares what they have to say. A shutdown would make people listen. But then Democrats would have to actually win the argument. They would need to have an argument. They would need a clear set of demands that kept them on the right side of public opinion and dramatized what is happening to the country right now.
I think the reason Klein sounds so vague and uncertain is that the message isn't really the goal here. He's already spelled out the goal in the bold text above.
Go back to the reasons he mentioned above why Chuck Schumer was not willing to shut down the government in March. Democrats expected an economic downturn and didn't want to confuse people about who was responsible. The problem is that didn't happen. Klein writes somewhat ruefully, "We are not in a recession. The economy is not in chaos." And here's the key line "Democrats cannot stand back and hope the markets will do their work for them."
He won't say it directly but the thrust of his argument is that Democrats didn't get the economic downturn they wanted so now they have to take action. Could a government shutdown create the kind of economic downturn they were counting on originally? Here's what CNN reported about a possible government shutdown and its impact on the economy back in 2023:
A shutdown probably won’t wreck the economy, especially if it’s short. But this kind of political chaos definitely won’t help matters.
And if it a shutdown lasts long enough, it could, along with these other headwinds, do some real damage.
“It was already a perfect storm. And now there’s a potential government shutdown,” said Greg Valliere, chief US policy strategist at AGF Investments.
Confidence is always a fragile thing. It’s hard to see how Washington would help instill confidence among inflation-weary Americans, not to mention business leaders and investors. CEOs are already sounding the alarm.
“It will further dent business and consumer confidence at a time when a confluence of risks threatens to drive growth in the final quarter of the year well below 1% and conceivably result in a net decline in growth,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief US economist at RSM.
And here's what Newsweek reported in March of this year when the previous government shutdown was looming.
"A possible U.S. government shutdown, while obviously disruptive if persistent over a protracted period, is unlikely on its own to trigger a recession, particularly given that past shutdowns have typically been short-lived," said Pushpin Singh, managing economist at the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).
"That said, if the purported shutdown lasts significantly longer than past instances, it will compound the headwinds currently afflicting the U.S. economy and place greater downward pressure on economic growth, not least due to lower government spending and spillover effects on activity more broadly," he added.
"A shutdown will contribute to the likelihood of a recession in terms of the uncertainty it would create, on top of the mountain of uncertainty other policies such as tariffs, tax expirations, the current budget process, and exploding debt are already creating," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonprofit fiscal watchdog.
Again, Klein doesn't say this outright because admitting it would spoil the blame game to follow, but the clear implication of his argument is that a little nudge toward recession would give Democrats the anti-Trump talking point they've been waiting for all along. They convinced themselves last time that it was too big a risk, that they might catch the blame, but they are more desperate now because Trump keeps winning.
Democrats are warming up to the idea that they can blame whatever chaos they unleash on Trump. They don't have to be right, they just have to believe their voters will let them off the hook if they can do damage to the president. This is where the resistance has brought us. Klein's argument reads like a trial balloon for economic self-destruction in the name of revivifying the desperate Democratic party.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.
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