This Shutdown Won’t Be Like The Others

The conventional wisdom is that the political party that shuts down the federal government by refusing to vote for a “clean” continuing resolution in hopes of winning policy concessions has never been successful — and that Democrats are unlikely to break that streak.

The assumption of members of both parties who hold this view is that Democrats will likely be blamed for the shutdown and take a short-term political hit for it, though both parties are likely to see reduced public approval numbers. When the government does reopen, the likely deal will be just a handshake agreement to earnestly negotiate.

But this shutdown will be different. Underneath its hood are a series of dynamics either unique to our moment, or freshly emergent since the last shutdown, that will upset this conventional wisdom.

First, current party political dynamics are creating incentives for a shutdown on both sides. In past shutdowns, one side has clearly been in favor of reopening the government. But right now, there are large factions in both parties that prefer the shutdown fight.

For Democratic leaders, coalition management hasbecome their primary incentive, much as it was for Republican Speaker John Boehner in 2013 when he reluctantly accepted a shutdown tactic to appease his base. Now, Democratic leaders are facing huge pressure from the progressive wing of the party to oppose President Donald Trump on policy, executive overreach and what they see as general lawlessness.

Even if minority leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries recognize that shutdowns are political losers that never achieve their policy goals, they may judge a party fissure to be an even worse outcome, for themselves and perhaps for the party. When choosing between bad options, you still need to identify the least-worst one.

Republicans, of course, are not about to save the Democrats from making a bad choice, and they can expect to win the public opinion battle during the shutdown if they stick to a simple message of reopening the government and resuming the bargaining.

The Trump administration, however, may have incentives to prefer a shutdown beyond just partisan public jockeying. With agencies lacking funding, the administration has additional leeway to implement their ideological project of reshaping the federal workforce.

Both Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought havepublicly discussed using the shutdown to lay off workers instead of furloughing them, and a leaked draft OMB memo pointed toward an accelerated RIF or “reduction in force” process for civil servants in programs not in line with the administration’s priorities. House Speaker Mike Johnson also voiced support for using the shutdown to shrink the federal government.

This cross-party enthusiasm for a shutdown also reflects a novel partisan arrangement in which both parties are out of sync with their traditional ideology. The three long shutdowns in the modern era all featured Republicans trying to leverage the shutdown and Democrats demanding a clean reopening. Those positions correspond closely to the general ideological outlook of the parties, with Democrats viewing federal programs as beneficial and effective, and Republicans generally being more skeptical about them.

This time, we find the parties at cross-purposes. This might make it tricky for Democrats to find their rhetorical footing during the shutdown — not voting to open the government but not wanting to trash it philosophically, either — and embolden Republicans and the administration to take novel and drastic actions with the agencies, in order to squeeze Democrats and achieve ideological aims. This is also the first shutdown in which the party holding out is seeking to increase federal spending, which might open up new avenues for compromise.

Second, this shutdown reflects a structural breakdown of the appropriations bargaining process as much as it represents policy differences between the parties.

Appropriations bills are subject to a filibuster in the Senate (requiring 60 votes to end), and thus have always been characterized by bipartisan negotiations and compromise spending outcomes. Past extended shutdowns have occurred when one party has tried to leverage that bipartisan necessity to force concessions on major partisan priorities (repealing the ACA in 2013, extending DACA in 2018, or funding a border wall in 2018-19).

This year, however, the Trump administration has badly undermined the traditional bargaining process by proposing and winning rescissions of some liberal programs through party-line Senate votes under the Impoundment Control Act, because bills under the ICA can’t be filibustered. He has also used so-called pocket rescissions to cancel more funding last month without any congressional vote.

Democrats correctly see this as the administration and the GOP unilaterally reversing last year’s bipartisan appropriations deal, and therefore making any negotiation this year worthless. How can you cut a deal if the other side just undoes it afterwards? Some Democrats have taken this even further, suggesting that a shutdown is the proper response to the perceived lawlessness of the Trump administration on spending and personnel decisions.

This has led to an unusual level of confusion about why Democrats are refusing to vote for the clean CR, the extension of the 2024 fiscal funding levels. For some, it’s about policy bargaining over ACA subsidies or Medicaid cuts. For others, it’s about getting the appropriations process back on track, by statutorily reining in pocket rescissions or party-line use of the ICA. And for others still, it’s about taking a stand and “fighting” the perceived excesses of the Trump administration.

In any case, short of an overhaul of the Impoundment Control Act and Trump signing a bill explicitly tying his own hands on presidential spending authority, it’s not clear what could get the process back to a spot where bipartisan bargaining could effectively happen, given the ever-present threat of unilateral administration action undermining any congressional deal.

Finally, the institutional structure of this shutdown is new. We’ve never had an extended shutdown leveraged by the opposition party using the filibuster when they faced a unified government with the president and both houses of Congress controlled by a single party. Past shutdowns have come under either divided government or under unified government with the party in power driving the shutdown. (The brief 2018 DACA shutdown didn’t last long enough to exhibit any particular dynamic.)

This is going to put a lot more political pressure on Democrats. Trying to leverage a shutdown as the minority party in the Senate is a difficult sell. If the president, the House, and a majority of the Senate all want the government reopened, public opinion will likely turn against you faster than in previous shutdowns, whereas having control of at least one chamber gives some democratic legitimacy to your bargaining position.

More importantly, however, a unified government can force a filibustering minority to repeatedly vote against bills that would immediately reopen the government, day after day. Indeed, majority leader Thune is already lining up such votes throughout this week. This means Democratic efforts to keep their coalition together will face repeated public tests, and provide clear evidence of any wavering.

After winning three votes from the Democratic coalition on Tuesday night, Thune has proven the Democrats are already divided. Even one more defection among Democrats in favor of reopening the government could alter the calculus of the parties and upend the shutdown.

There are few plausible ways to end this, but one would be for the Republicans to offer to extend the ACA subsidies in November, after the Democrats agree to vote for the clean CR now. This would give a lot of factions what they want; liberals would have gotten their fight, Schumer would get his coalition management, Trump would escape from any statutory restrictions on his spending actions, and Republicans would protect their front-line members on health care, neutralizing the issue somewhat for 2026.

Even that would be a departure from the past, though, the first time an opposition party would have won any significant — if temporary — concession from the dominant party. The question hanging over the situation is when, and if, the larger forces driving both parties into this impasse will ease up enough for that kind of face-saving outcome.