Democrats are peering into the abyss of forcing a government shutdown. They may be badly overestimating their leverage.
The US government will run out of money soon without Congress passing a “continuing resolution” (CR) to fund its operations. Congress is supposed to pass an annual budget that prevents this sort of periodic crisis, but it hasn’t done so in several years. So, here we go again.
House Republicans did their part on Tuesday night, passing by a 217-213 vote a CR that would fund the government through September 30. One Republican voted no on principle against big government, and one red-district Democrat crossed the aisle to vote yes.
It’s now up to the Senate, where Republicans have 53 votes, and 60 are needed. That requires the support of seven Democrats, but thus far only iconoclastic Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman says he will not vote to shut down the government. Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer says that there aren’t six more Democratic votes, so Republicans need to compromise or the government will shut down.
In simple Washington math, Schumer holds the cards: without Senate Democratic votes, the CR won’t pass. Democrats would prefer a 30-day CR, allowing them to extract concessions once every month to avoid shutdowns. But whether Schumer knows it or not, he’s bluffing. What Democrats consider their leverage is actually a firecracker primed to go off in their own faces.
Power in Washington isn’t just who has the votes. It’s also about who can move the public, who uses their most precious resources (time and public attention) to the greatest effect, and who gets the most out of the leverage they have.
As far as moving the public, what’s the Democrats’ message? They’ve spent most of the last 14 years arguing that Republicans were government-hating meanies who acted like terrorists by trying to shut it down. They’ve spent most of the past two months arguing to voters and courts that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) were doing incalculable damage by even temporary pauses in government payments. Abruptly deciding to become the “you don’t need the government for a while” party will sound implausible coming from them.
Besides the natural advantage of being the party of government, Democrats have usually had the upper hand in shifting the blame for shutdowns to the Republicans in the past because they had the White House. It’s easier for one man to argue with a legislative caucus.
But that dynamic is flipped when dealing with Trump, who is nothing if not able to draw attention to his own blunt message. He’d love to adopt the mantle of the guy who just wants to keep things open for business. Democrats, for their part, haven’t even begun the heavy work of explaining to voters succinctly what they are demanding as a condition of a deal.
Then, consider the cost of picking this fight instead of other fights. One of the golden rules of politics, as in war, is Napoleon’s dictum: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Trump’s tariff battles with Canada, Mexico, China, and the EU have rattled markets and unsettled voters. Changing the subject and giving the president a convenient scapegoat for market fluctuations is a gift that Democrats would be fools to give him.
This is why James Carville wrote in the New York Times that Democrats should “roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us”. Shutting down the government to extract diffuse and unspecified concessions is the opposite of that. If Democrats do it, it won’t be a strategy but an attempt to mollify the angriest elements of their activist base. Doing so is exactly what got them kicked out of power in the first place.
Then, there’s what you do with the power you have. With Trump and Musk trying to seize more executive control of spending, Democrats should have a common interest with at least some Republicans in Congress in reasserting Congressional primacy over spending decisions.
A big legal fight is brewing over “impoundment”, the practice of the executive refusing to spend Congressionally-appropriated funds when it thinks they’re being wasted. But the president is never on stronger ground over impoundment than when the government is running out of money and he has to pick priorities. A shutdown would empower the Office of Management and Budget, under spending hawk Russ Vought, to freeze every penny of disfavoured spending on the legitimate grounds that the government needs to husband its resources for essential functions. That almost certainly means that Democrats’ preferred spending priorities would go to the back of the line.
If Democrats want to make a statement of how much they oppose Trump and the lengths they will go to in order to dramatise that, they should shut down the government. But if they actually want to win arguments with the voters, gain power, and use the power they have to advance their preferred ends, that’s the last thing they should do.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
