The real reason Democrats forced a government shutdown

Uncle Sam has closed up shop.

The federal government shut down on Wednesday, as Congress failed to extend its annual appropriations. Now, food will go uninspected, Superfund sites uncleaned, and IRS helplines unanswered. Millions of Americans will suffer from disrupted government services, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are liable to miss paychecks, and economic growth will likely slow.

What explains our government’s latest act of self-sabotage? At first glance, the shutdown seems to be rooted in disputes about health care policy. Republicans back a bill that would maintain existing government funding levels for seven weeks while the two parties negotiate over a broader budget. Democrats, by contrast, say that any new spending bill must extend the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced health insurance subsidies — which are set to expire at year’s end — and reverse President Donald Trump’s Medicaid cuts.

But the shutdown is not really about health insurance. Democrats could have backed the GOP’s seven-week funding extension, while still holding out for their preferred health care policies in negotiations over a long-term budget. Put differently, forcing a shutdown right now was not actually necessary to save the ACA’s enhanced tax credits or reverse Trump’s Medicaid cuts. Yet Democrats chose to embrace procedural hardball, anyway.

In truth, the shutdown was born out of the interaction between three related, big-picture developments in American politics, none of which concern the details of fiscal policy:

To understand how these three developments have conspired to shutter the government, it’s worth briefly examining each in turn.

The most important bit of context for the present crisis is Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. Trump has launched pretextual investigations against his enemies, awarded pardons and military honors to his insurrectionary friends, extorted television networks into suppressing critical journalism and comedy (with mixed success), deported longtime US residents without due process, and vowed to crack down on progressive organizations in the name of counter-terrorism.

Perhaps most significantly, Trump has asserted the power to nullify congressionally ordered spending, refusing to appropriate $4 billion in legislatively mandated foreign aid. And last week, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gave this power grab its preliminary blessing.

All this has understandably inflamed the Democratic base. The party’s donors, activists, and most engaged voters believe their country is slouching toward autocratic rule. And they want their elected representatives to give voice to their alarm for the republic and their contempt for Trump’s GOP. Before the current funding fight, many Democratic voters felt their party was not doing enough to resist Trump, deriding it in polls as “weak” and “ineffective.”

Meanwhile, the Senate’s rules give the party enough power to choke off federal funding, but too little to achieve much else.

Republicans boast majorities in both chambers of Congress. But in the Senate, the filibuster establishes a 60-vote threshold for the passage of most legislation. As a result, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s 47-seat caucus has the authority to block most bills. But it does not have much standing to dictate terms to Republicans, who feel that voters gave them a mandate for their right-wing agenda.

Put all this together, and you have a recipe for a shutdown.

Back in March, Senate Democrats already found it politically painful to help Republicans keep the government’s lights on. After Schumer came out against a shutdown, he faced a fusillade of condemnations from liberal organizations and activists.

But Trump’s escalating power grabs since the spring have made the party’s position even more vexing. In particular, his insistence that he can unilaterally withhold spending he doesn’t like — and the Supreme Court’s recent validation of this position — has poisoned the budget process. For Democrats, what’s the point of haggling for minor concessions from the GOP majority when the Republican president can nullify them at will? Or, more to the point: How can Democrats sell small budgetary victories to their base, when they can’t even say with certainty that those little wins are real?

To address this problem, Democrats have pushed for any spending bill to include language that curtails Trump’s authority to withhold appropriations. But congressional Republicans are, by and large, allergic to restricting the president’s power.

Thus, Senate Democrats ultimately found voting to extend the existing budget — without any guarantee that the president would honor its most progressive provisions — unpalatable. Doing so would have entailed acquiescing to Trump’s authoritarian affronts to congressional power and invited the wrath of the party’s activists and donors, potentially undermining Democratic fundraising and enthusiasm in next year’s midterm elections.

To avoid such blowback, the party chose to make fiscal demands so large and popular that 1) Trump could not nullify them without triggering a big scandal and 2) Republicans could not grant them without handing the Democratic base a major ideological victory. Taken together, the Democrats’ demands on the ACA and Medicaid would increase social spending by more than $1 trillion over the next decade. Were the party to somehow force a unified GOP government to do this, even the most hardline progressive activists would need to acknowledge that Democrats had stood up to Trump and made him blink.

Thus, the fundamental cause of the shutdown is not the major parties’ perennial disagreements about health care policy. Rather, it is that the combination of Trump’s illiberalism — and the Senate’s rules — put Democrats in an impossible position. Schumer’s caucus is too weak to force through meaningful curbs on Trump’s authoritarianism. But it is too strong to plead total impotence to its base. Its path of least resistance was therefore to make Republicans an offer they couldn’t accept.