Baby Steps to a Shutdown Solution

A deal is coming into sight. How to get there? Maybe not yet.

The shutdown continues…but perhaps the stalemate is, if not breaking, at least getting to the point where it might begin to break. It appears now that, contrary to most (and certainly my) expectations that Democrats are “winning” the confrontation. But it’s still not at all clear how they can cash that in.

That we’re getting closer to the end isn’t entirely a surprise. One or two weeks of a shutdown is annoying to many but a major disruption to relatively few people; over time, the effects just get worse and worse for more and more people.

That’s not the only thing that has changed over the last two or three weeks. After all, there are a number of shutdowns that have collapsed quickly – most notably the impasse most similar in some ways to this one, when Senate Democrats used a filibuster to force a government closure in 2018 over DACA. When Democrats ended that one, it became the sixth short stoppage.¹ Those episode are why I talk about extended shutdowns that last longer than a long weekend as a different category. Of course, no one knows for sure as a deadline approaches whether things will be settled at the last minute, whether one side will cave quickly or whether they’re headed for one of these longer shutdowns. After the two week mark, it was clear that Democrats weren’t bluffing.

(There was some reporting I’ve seen that within the White House no one expected Democrats to last more than ten days, so it may have taken more than two weeks for them to realize that this wasn’t going to be like 2018. One key thing to remember: This isn’t a professional White House. The best bet is always going to be that they have no idea what they’re doing.)

So pressure to end the stalemate are growing, while everyone involved now realizes that no one is bluffing. But that’s not all. The last piece of this kicked in on Sunday and Monday, when a series of public polls that were brutal for Donald Trump and the Republicans. Not only is their party still taking the bulk of the blame, but Trump’s approval ratings are starting to slide.

That wasn’t clear two weeks ago. It is now. On the eve of the shutdown, Trump’s net approval (that is, approval minus disapproval) stood at -12.4 percentage points according to FiftyPlusOne; it’s down to -14.9 percentage points now. Similarly, Nate Silver had net approval at -10.3 back then; it’s -12.8 now.² Approval, disapproval, and net approval all hit their worst numbers so far this year. Trump is still doing a bit better than he was at this point in 2017, but it’s close, and as has been true all year no other first-year president during the polling era has matched either Trump 2017 or Trump 2025.

Of course, all we know is he’s losing popularity. It could be any number of things, alone or together, that are hurting him. But odds are that Republicans in Congress attribute it to the shutdown, and will want to figure out a way out of it.

I should say: I still don’t think people appreciate just how thoroughly the GOP has botched this. I know that some Democrats believe that a shutdown-by-filibuster would be blamed on the party holding Congressional majorities and the White House, but that’s not how it worked in 2018 and it’s not how virtually every veteran shutdown observer saw things at the outset. All Republicans had to do, everyone assumed, was to talk about how the minority Democrats were thwarting the will of the majority – who after all, were just asking for a short extension keeping the September status quo in place during negotiations. There was no shortage of quotes from Democrats in and out of Congress begging Chuck Schumer and the Democrats to shut down the government. Even worse for the Democrats, they weren’t even unified going in, with three Senators breaking with the party. That’s a recipe for people concluding that Democrats were to blame.

And yet? First of all, Schumer has done an surprisingly strong job holding his party together and the party overall has been remarkably good at staying on message throughout. It helps that they chose to frame this as a struggle over health care, where the party generally is strongest. But Democrats aren’t exactly known for following the party line, and there are more than enough other things they’ve been eager to talk about from the vandalism of the White House to armed thugs attacking US cities to tariffs to war crimes to…well, there’s plenty. And yet at least my impression is that they’ve managed to respond to those things while also making it clear, or clear enough, that the shutdown is about health care.

That said, my guess is that the polling showing Republicans to blame is mainly about the GOP’s incompetence. Early on especially, Trump and others were welcoming the shutdown and talking about how great it was for them; no wonder people thought it was Trump’s shutdown! Meanwhile, Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to send the House home – while refusing to swear in Member-Elect Adelita Grijalva – has predictably backfired. Instead of pounding the idea home that Democrats were violating norms by shutting down the government by filibuster, Republicans have been the far more obvious and clear-cut norm-breakers.

We’re now getting more regular reported items that various groups of Senators are starting to talk about a way out. Unfortunately, that runs straight into the real reason that Democrats were ready to force a government closure. Trump and the Republicans not only haven’t been reliable bargaining partners, but the White House has repeatedly ignored the law when it comes to government spending. Indeed, in this sense the shutdown, even by a Democratic filibuster against a clean spending extension bill, really is the Republicans’ fault.

It makes reaching any deal very difficult. Democrats aren’t apt to trust Republican promises.³ And while Democrats have some internal differences, that’s nothing compared to the problems Republicans have between House (and some Senate) radicals, more traditionally conservative Republicans, and the wild card in the Oval Office, who reportedly hasn’t engaged much at all on the issue — but is capable of rapidly turning on any Republicans who try to reach an agreement.

So what’s probably happened is that many Senators from both parties have adjusted their expectations of what a final deal will look like, with the result tilted more towards giving Democrats some sort of real win on health care, a win that looked very unlikely at first. That part of the process may be — perhaps — coming to a close.

But we could still be a ways away from everyone who needs to accept that realizing that they in fact need to do so. And also some ways away from figuring out how to cut a deal to actually implement the result they’ve settled on. Under conditions of extreme, and justified, mistrust of the president.

All that could happen quickly…or not. As Bloomberg’s excellent congressional reporter Stephen Dennis always says:

How deals sometimes come together in Congress: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! REBOOT. MAYBE? NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO YES!

So if we’re now approaching that “maybe?” we still could have a long ways to go.

1. Note that until the Jimmy Carter presidency, an impasse over spending bills would produce the government moving to, basically, autopilot. The government would keep the status quo going, on the assumption that eventually they would get the money that they were spending during the confrontation. Carter’s White House changed the rules so that an impasse yielded a shutdown, and that’s why we’re where we are now.

2. In fact, it’s worse that that. It turned out that the September 30 date was at a low point for Trump, so when the next polls (including those taken before the shutdown began but reported after) Trump rallied a bit. That happens all the time with polling averages; they bounce around, probably just from random variation. What was unusual in the last couple of days was that several high-profile outfits released surveys, and pretty much all of them were bad for Trump. That leaves an impression!

3. This is surprisingly rare. As much disdain as Republicans had for Bill Clinton and Democrats had for Newt Gingrich, I don’t think that mutual mistrust delayed the end of the 1995-1996 shutdown showdowns. There have certainly been times that Congress didn’t trust a president in some ways, or that one party wasn’t sure that the other party’s congressional leaders could deliver needed votes. But I don’t think there’s anything close to the current lack of trust in the president’s word.