What did Democrats accomplish with the government shutdown? Not much it turns out. And while the base is raging at Chuck Schumer for his perceived failure in tacitly allowing the shutdown to end, the reality is that there was never going to be a winning outcome from this. Shutdowns never work the way the people demanding the shutdown hope they will.
As the longest government shutdown in U.S. history nears its denouement, many on the left have put on a performance of disappointment. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called the bipartisan deal to reopen the government “a policy and political disaster.” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, deemed it “capitulation.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) described it as “pathetic.”
They’re mad that Democrats didn’t get an extension of all covid-era Obamacare subsidies, but the public could do without such faux outrage. A cursory tour through the United States’ history with shutdown brinkmanship shows that the party that takes the government hostage to advance its policy goals almost never succeeds. Republicans failed to defund Obamacare in 2013, and President Donald Trump in 2019 failed to secure funding for his border wall.
That’s because even partial shutdowns eventually become too politically painful to maintain, as Democrats who watched airlines cancel thousands of flights over the past few days can attest.
This was always going to fail. Republicans never had any incentive to agree to Democrats' demands. As Josh Barro points out elsewhere, the very best case scenario was to hand Republicans a lot more power and hope that worked out well for Dems in the future.
Many of the people bemoaning the Democrats’ retreat offer no convincing theory of how the shutdown should have come to an end. The most convincing columns, like one from Jonathan Chait, argue that Republicans would have eventually walked through Door No. 2 (reopen the government without Democrats’ votes) and that Democrats should have made them do this, likely by weakening the filibuster, because Democrats stand to gain in the long run from rules that make it easier to pass legislation...
Taking the long view on the filibuster — let Republicans pass more bills now, and we’ll do even more later — is fine if you think we’re engaged in normal politics. But a lot of the pro-shutdown rhetoric has focused on the abnormality of the situation we are in with President Trump and the need to contain him in the near term; weakening the filibuster obviously does not serve that goal.
The key thing here is that Democrats were never going to get the outcome their voters craved: either a substantial change from Republicans’ desired health care policy or a broader change in the nature of the Trump administration. The only available outcomes were this one, or another one that would have saved Democrats from a tough vote but also would have left Mr. Trump with more power than he entered the shutdown with.
Dems wouldn't have gotten as far as they did without the helpful insulation from their friends in the media. But at some point it was going to come back to bite them if they kept it going much longer.
The liberals who want to prolong the government shutdown refuse to acknowledge the unnecessary pain they have already caused. The Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the reduction in hours worked by furloughed federal workers alone would cost the economy $14 billion if it continued until Thanksgiving. And that doesn’t consider the misery of disrupted travel caused by the funding pause.
They had no plan to win except to shift the blame to the party that didn't demand this shutdown. They got surprisingly far with that, but you can't defy gravity forever.
Chuck Schumer is taking the blame now based on the mistaken theory that holding out a bit longer would have led to some better outcome. But in this case Schumer was right. Stopping now, before Americans got truly sick of all the flight cancelations messing up their holiday plans, was the least bad ending to a dumb shutdown. The base may be furious but that's because they are angry zealots who don't care who gets hurt as long as they can hurt President Trump. Schumer did the best thing he could have done by letting this end before voters got serious about assigning blame.
