Shutdown's End

There was no winning move - but the Democrats played it better than people think.

I foolishly waited 24 hours before doing a shutdown wrap (while David wrote an excellent one yesterday, making the crucial point that this White House doesn’t seem to care how unpopular the president is), so Josh Huder beat me to the key point here. As he put it: “Democrats may have over-performed on policy and underperformed on politics.”

The basic story from the beginning has been that there was no winning move for the Democrats, or any real way to get through the end of the fiscal year without eventually angering their own party. Given the situation, they overall played it reasonably well. Even, with caveats, the end game. But no one wants to hear that.

One thing I want to emphasize up top: Had Democrats stuck together longer, it’s possible that the shutdown would have ended with the elimination of the Senate filibuster. Liberal filibuster opponents are bitter that it didn’t end that way. In my view, they are dramatically underestimating the damage that Republicans would do over the next fifteen months with that constraint removed. Including, among other things, election legislation they haven’t passed because the filibuster blocks it.¹

Essentially, in the middle of a full-on assault by Republicans against the republic, eliminating the filibuster would suddenly give them a powerful new weapon. That doesn’t seem sensible to me. At all. Whatever one thinks about Senate structure in the abstract.²

Let’s go back to the basics.

• Democrats in Congress are particularly poorly positioned to oppose Donald Trump successfully. Over the course of the year, Democratic governors, state attorneys general, judges (both Democrats and Republicans), and even individual citizens have all at times resisted effectively. Democrats in Congress keep losing votes. That’s what happens when the party that’s okay with an assault on the Constitution has more votes.

• Even so, congressional Democrats have made a fair amount of headway. They’ve held protests at agencies under attack, pushed to inspect detention centers (including abroad), held shadow hearings to expose what Trump was doing, and more. They’ve also used delaying tactics so well in the Senate that Republicans eventually changed Senate procedure to prevent it, and they’ve been unusually united in opposing legislation and Trump’s nominees.

• What’s more, the media and lots of rank-and-file voters expect (correctly or, as it happens in this case, not) for Congress to be the focus of opposition. So people not only have unreasonable expectations, but they also tend to overlook or downplay what others are doing – especially as a party resistance.

• The filibuster and the need to pass annual spending bills seems to give Senate Democrats one big exception to this: They are in fact able, if they are united, able to block bills. But it’s very limited; after all, they can’t pass anything, either, and even if they can win in the Senate there’s still the House and the president. In fact, it produces a no-win situation. Jeff Lazarus put it nicely on Monday: “This gets at the nature of political power. Right now at the federal level Republicans have the vast majority of it. Not all, but much, much more than Democrats. And when you have that advantage you can put the other party in lose-lose situations & force them to make unpopular choices.”

• That’s not just rationalizing after the fact; close observers of previous shutdowns, myself included, called this a no-win situation for Senate Democrats before the government closure began.