Shutdown Showdown Primer

The Democrats will finally have a bit of clout. But it's complicated.

A long one today, about the upcoming shutdown showdown, and what Democrats can and should be doing about it.

The last extension of regular spending expires on March 14, and Congress will need to pass either a further extension (a Continuing Resolution, or “CR”) or finally getting around to proper rest-of-the-fiscal-year funding (in an omnibus spending bill) many months after the old fiscal year concluded at the end of September. Otherwise, the government shuts down.

This creates a problem for the GOP and their very narrow margins in both chambers of Congress. A whole lot of congressional Republicans don’t like to vote for spending bills at all, or perhaps only with very steep cuts to popular government programs. Whatever they do will need just a simple majority in the House, and it’s difficult to see how that can happen with only Republican votes. On the Senate side, the bill can be filibustered, meaning that the 53 Republicans won’t be enough to guarantee passage.

If nothing passes, big parts of the government shuts down until, well, something passes. That’s only happened (for longer than a long weekend) a few times under the current rules and practices. Each time, it happened because one group with the votes to back it up wanted a shutdown.

Democratic activists, pundits, and smart observers are correctly pointing out, therefore, that this will provide the party with a rare opportunity in which they have real leverage despite being in the minority. On the House side, Republicans probably need Democratic votes, and on the Senate side they’ll definitely either need Democratic votes or a willingness to let something pass with a simple majority.

Those Democrats also make the very good point that as long as the Trump administration is lawlessly impounding appropriated funds – that is, refusing to spend money they are by law obliged to spend – there’s no point in negotiating, since there’s no way to know if the administration will actually do what it signs into law. So while Democrats can’t hope to negotiate for funding levels they like, given that they’re in the minority, they certainly can refuse to supply any votes until the administration starts following the law and the Constitution.

At the same time there’s a lot of anxiety among those outside Democrats because the party in Congress is being ambiguous about its plans. The main talking point Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and others are pushing is that it’s up to the majority party Republicans to keep the government running; they’re further making noises about bipartisanship being a good thing and that they are willing to cooperate to find a solution if necessary. Josh Marshall is absolutely correct: What Hill Democrats are saying would fit if their intention is to only supply votes if they get concessions that are meaningful in the present context, but it would also fit if they have no interest in a major confrontation.

Those are the basics.

Pushing hard on the idea that it’s up to Republicans to come up with the votes makes a lot of sense to me – especially if they’re pretty sure that House Republicans can’t do it. Presidents have a lot of advantages in spinning shutdown showdowns, and if a shutdown does happen Donald Trump will have the opportunity to blame the Democrats and “Congress” and talk about all the important things that aren’t happening with the government closed. The other factor? The side that has publicly pushed for a shutdown usually gets the blame.

Democrats don’t want to be left arguing that they are acting on principle (even the very good principle of supporting the rule of law) while people suffer. Better to fight now to make the media understand where the responsibility lies. Even if that might sound wobbly at this point (to the very small group who are paying attention to next month’s potential big story now). And yes, that suggests that they shouldn’t be making demands with the public threat of forcing a shutdown if their demands are not met, although there’s nothing wrong with a more positive-focused message. For now, they’re most likely better off keeping their (correct and important!) attacks on Musk and Trump over lawlessly slashing valuable and popular government programs one one track, while separately emphasizing GOP responsibility for March 14. That’s the public side; they can also signal to congressional Republicans that they’re only available to negotiate if Trump returns to Constitutional government.

On the Senate side, Schumer’s leverage isn’t as impressive as it might seem. He’s surely remembering the brief shutdown in January 2018, when Democrats filibustered against a bill to keep the government open in order to support the DACA immigration program. Democrats were correct that protecting Dreamers (undocumented people who had come to the US at a very young age) was a popular cause – but using the filibuster as the minority party to support even a popular bill wasn’t a strong position to be in, and Schumer’s Democrats surrendered within a couple of days.

Now, in 2025, Trump is even more impatient, and the Republican majority in the Senate is larger than it was in 2018 and more reluctant to confront Trump, at least so far. I suspect that if Democrats did use the filibuster to shut down the government against a bill that had passed the House and had a majority in the Senate that it wouldn’t take long for Republicans to impose changes in Senate procedures to allow the bill to pass – and, in doing so, to take away the ability that Democrats have already used during in the last few months to defeat on, for example, abortion.

There’s a reasonable argument that Democrats in such a situation should filibuster anyway, and force Republicans to deal with it, one way or another. Perhaps! The point here is only that it’s not an automatic win, either on the Senate floor or in public opinion.

The best bargaining position the Democrats have is from the House, if Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t have the votes to pass something – at least something that has a Senate majority. And the bonus here for Democrats is that if that’s the case, it will likely come with plenty of juicy quotes from intra-GOP scuffling about how shutting down the government would be just fine. That’s when Democrats would have a real opportunity to press for what they want.

Which gets to one more thing: We’re three weeks into this presidency, and things are moving very quickly. Trump was slapped down by five different judges on Monday alone; normally cautious people are talking about a “Constitutional crisis.” Who knows where things will stand by mid-March? Meanwhile, Democrats may not be able to do much on the House or Senate floor right now, but they should continue the public action they’ve been taking for the last week, coordinating as much as they can with the rest of the party, such as the state attorneys general bringing some of these cases.

To put this all together: The need to keep the government going will certainly give Democrats some leverage. But how much, how to maximize it, and how to use it? Those are questions with non-obvious answers, especially with a month to go before the deadline.

All that said, there’s nothing wrong at all for those who want to push Democrats to hang tough and do more to use whatever sway they have, whether it’s a podcast episode or a push from an organization group or just a phone call to a constituent’s members of Congress. After all, one challenge that Schumer and Jeffries have in this showdown is keeping their caucus united.

Beyond that: A good thing to keep in mind today and for the months ahead is that there is no one magic button available to protect US democracy. Everything counts, and success (and failure) are almost certain to be incremental, not absolute. How congressional Democrats navigate this opportunity matters, but so does everything else going on. And the tough truth is that a congressional minority is just not going to be the one thing that saves the republic, no matter how well they play their hand. So yes, push them to be better — but keep pushing everyone else, including Republicans, to stand up for the Constitution.