Twenty-Eight Shutdown Thoughts

May I never have to write about these things again

Dear Friends,

The shutdown is (almost) over.

After negotiating a deal over the weekend, on Monday the Senate voted 60-40 to pass a package composed of (1) the full year FY2026 appropriations bills for Agriculture, Legislative Branch, and Military Construction and Veterans’ Affairs (the so-called minibus); and (2) a continuing resolution through January 30, 2026 for the remaining 9 unpassed FY2026 bills.

On Tuesday night, the House rules committee met and teed up the bill to go to the House floor on Wednesday, where is should pass as part of the vote stack between 5-7pm. The president will undoubtedly sign the bill, and that could open the government as early as tomorrow morning.

The shutdown impasse ended when five new Democratic Senators (Kaine from Virginia, Rosen from Nevada, Durbin from Illinois, and Shaheen and Hassen from New Hampshire, joined the three who had consistently voted to reopen the government (Fetterman from Pennsylvania, Cortez-Masto from Nevada, and independent Angus King from Maine) to provide enough votes for the deal to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

If you want to read the best detailed summary of the what’s in the deal, I recommend going straight to the Senate appropriations committee’s mouth and looking the summaries of the MilCon bill, the Agriculture bill, and the Legislative Branch bill, and the section-by-section breakdown of the CR portion.

I found interesting and informative things about the deal and the politics in analysis by Josh Huder, Jonathan Bernstein, Josh Barro, Nate Silver, Dan Drezner, Matt Ygleisas, Ezra Klein, Gabe Fleischer, John Lawrence, Michael Cohen, Jonathan Chait, Dave Karpf, the Central Air folks, and of course Liam Donovan’s twitter feed.

Here are 28 quick thoughts of my own.

The Immediate Policy Outcomes

#1. That the Democrats did not win their top-line policy demands on health care or presidential spending encroachment by shutting down the government is totally unremarkable and you should be skeptical of anyone who claimed it was ever possible and, in particular, anyone who continues to claim it would have been possible if they held out longer.

#2. I’m unimpressed by many of the alleged policy wins Democrats are pointing to in the new Senate CR/minibus; the SNAP funding, the reversal of October RIFs, and the backpay for furloughed federal employees are all internal issues to the shutdown and none would have been necessary if the shutdown didn’t happen in the first place—and all have bipartisan support anyway.

#3. The main policy win I do see is that the Senate has successfully jammed the House Republicans (and, to a lesser degree, the administration) on the three full bills in the minibus, and in particular on the Legislative Branch bill that prevents the gutting of GAO appropriations oversight; this was probably going to happen anyway—the Senate routinely jams the House majority on appropriations bills—but getting the House conservatives to vote for it with a smile on their faces is not nothing.

#4. Getting a guarantee of a future vote in the Senate on the ACA subsidy extensions is absurdly thin gruel and you should laugh at anyone who tells you it’s more than a fig leaf; the Senate effectively already took a version of that vote on Monday when they rejected a procedural motion from Senator Baldwin and holding another vote next month will be slightly-higher profile but ultimately not worth much.

#5. Prior to the shutdown, I thought ACA subsidy extension was a policy that was likely to be approved after a compromise (perhaps by tightening eligibility and/or combining it with something like a tariff-bailout for farmers); it’s now a fair bit less likely, because the increased salience of the issue has turned it into a partisan existential matter. Secret Congress theory and all.

#6. Passing an amended version of the House-passed CR—which was basically a necessity at this point, since the House-passed CR is set to expire on November 21—did require the House to come back to DC in order to pass the bill as amended, meaning Representative-elect Grijalva will be sworn in (tin-foil hat conspiracies aside), but also that the Epstein drama will be back in the news this week.

Maybe @ringwiss and like 3 others can tell why this picture makes no sense.

The Politics of Ending the Shutdown

#7. A truism of politics is everyone thinks their side is too moral and disorganized to be as effective in the face of their amoral, ruthless opponents, but I actually think it might be right that Trump has a higher tolerance/indifference to suffering and that trying to break him in a public pain contest is/was a fool’s errand.

#8. As a short-term public opinion matter, the Democrats took far less blame for this shutdown than I expected; I suspect this is some combination of (1) Trump’s shutdown behavior; (2) shutdowns moving beyond the partisan event horizon and now just reflecting presidential approval; (3) media/public orientation toward the parties, both fair and unfair; and (4) the general unpopularity of the Trump administration right now.

#9. Trump’s shutdown approach really was dumb; he managed to project a strategic indifference/disengagement to it with regard to it being a pressing problem that deserved his attention, but also tried to tactically leverage it to pursue ideological goals, and in the process muddied the water about who was taking the hostages and who was trying to just get the government reopened.

#10. The administration moves on SNAP were particularly befuddling—right after we got done discussing how it would be politically insane for Dems to go to court to try to stop the illegal payments to troops, Trump went to court to try to stop having to provide food to poor people—and (likely) paid a big price for it in public opinion, but again, if you are trying to signal resolve in a political pain contest, you could do a lot worse.

#11. With Trump’s popularity falling and the Dems exceeding expectations in the various elections last week, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to wonder why Democrats threw in the towel here, but the general what-the-fuck-were-we-even-doing-this-for sentiment that I’m getting from a lot of liberals is the right question, just posed at the wrong time; shutting down the government was always, at best, the least-worst option, and the endgame was always going to include the Democrats agreeing to reopen the government in exchange for very little, if anything, of substance—and if you didn’t understand that, fine, but it should be apparent that it’s at least plausible now that we are at the high-tide of political value the Dems can wring out of this, and if you think another week, or two, or month of this was going to substantially change it for the better, you need to explain why and how.

#12. My basic sense is that maybe a third or half of the Senate Democrats (1) did not think continuing the shutdown was going to yield any significant further policy or political gains, but (2) was going to produce further suffering among various constituencies and (3) held a fair amount of individual and/or party political risk if Thanksgiving travel turned into a complete shitshow, and (4) might thus potentially throw away the marginal wins included in the negotiated deal.

#13. A better leader than Schumer could have held the shutdown coalition together longer—I certainly don’t think he’s the strongest legislative leader around—but that’s a different take than arguing Schumer orchestrated the ending of the shutdown or was purposefully looking for the off-ramp; we don’t have enough reporting right now to know his exact dealings with the moderate defectors, but my guess is that Schumer would not have personally given up at this particular point if he had the unilateral power to keep it going; consequently, I don’t think it’s exactly right to say the Democrats or Schumer caved—parties are collections of individuals, and while they can try to coordinate and sometimes succeed at it, in the end there’s nothing leaders can do if 10 Senate Democrats adamantly decide they want the government back open and the leaders can’t convince them otherwise.

#14. Exactly 8 Democrats voted for the Senate deal and it got exactly 60 votes in the Senate—meaning no Dems vote in favor just for position-taking purposes; that suggests there may have been a fair number of “vote no, hope yes” Dems, who wanted this over but definitely didn’t want the wrath of the Dem base.

#15. The split vote of Senators Warner (no) and Kaine (yes) from Virginia are instructive here; the most likely explanation is that Kaine just won reelection last year, while Warner is up in ‘26 and wants to avoid any semblance of activist wrath that could lead to a primary challenge next year.

#16. There was no chance the GOP Senators were about to modify the filibuster in order to end the shutdown; that was a fever dream of the odd Trump/liberal coalition last week and a predictable final political argument of Democratic shutdown dead-enders after the deal was cut.

#17. The filibuster is politically beneficial to (1) individual Senators; (2) Senate majority and minority parties; and (3) the Senate as a chamber; the last one in particular is undervalued in public discussion—the Senate wins more than its fair share of House-Senate negotiations because of the filibuster—and it’s one subtle reason why it was easier to nuke the filibuster on nominations. which do not implicate House opinion/negotiations.

#18. Moderate Senators particularly like the filibuster because it (1) makes them players when they are in the minority; and (2) shields them from tough spots when they are in the majority—if you kill the filibuster, they lose their power in the minority and get all the pressure put on them in the majority; in effect, moderates accept overall less policy passing in exchange for policy always moving their direction, regardless of who is in charge.

#19. None of this is great for getting public policy that reflects majority popular opinion as expressed through elections and you wouldn’t design a legislature with the filibuster today if starting from scratch, but it’s just one of many counter-majoritarian features of the federal government that aren’t included in the design of most modern democracies—the veto, a malapportioned upper chamber, and bicameralism itself are all vestiges of 18th century Anglo-American political thought and practice; the filibuster is an easy target because it’s so easy to change, but it only really affects a very narrow window of policymaking—unified governments that have 50 but not 60 votes for something in the Senate.

Trump’s approval ratings slid dramatically in the last two weeks, perhaps because he picked a dumb fight over SNAP

The Forward Going Politics

#20. Democrats may benefit politically from having the ACA issue rather than the policy; it makes many upscale liberals uncomfortable to think this way, but it’s sound electoral logic to not take your best issue off the table, and double so when the other party has unilateral control of the government.

#21. That the activist base of the Dems has returned to being livid at the leadership for how this has ended is not surprising and there’ a good chance Schumer is toast as Senate Dem leader next Congress, which is of course a big turnaround from the heady days of the first two weeks in October; on the other hand, coalition management was probably the driving force that caused the shutdown, and to come out of it with an activist base angrier than you went in can only be seen as as failure of such management.

#22. Whether the Democrats “won” the shutdown in some objective sense isn’t really important for forward going politics—the key takeaway from the last month is going to be how the parties come to understand what happened; this is part of the reason we are seeing such a furious fight among internal Democratic party actors, all of whom want to influence the accepted party understanding in ways that benefit their future interests and goals (that’s fine!).

#23. My personal hope is that the Dems end up seeing the shutdown as a failure because (1) shutdowns are objectively bad for governance; and consequently (2) we do not want to normalize them as effective politics; that is/was the lesson the GOP finally learned after 2013 and 2019, but I’m definitely worried that the lack of serious political pain for the Dems this month may lead us right back into another shutdown in the coming years.

#24. Of immediate concern, of course, is that the new CR (covering the nine appropriations bills not finalized in the deal) only goes through January 30, 2026 and that creates another possible round of brinksmanship and another possible shutdown; I see a lot of liberals doing some—frankly crazy—talking about how the year-long SNAP funding and such would insulate some pressure points in a second shutdown and that it might be more effective, but I suspect there will be little to no appetite for a second shutdown among the 8 Dems who voted for the deal, and without them, you literally don’t have the votes.

#25. Democratic Senate primary candidates and would-be 2028 presidential candidates are falling over each other to condemn the ending of the shutdown, and what this mostly tells you is how powerful the party activists are in primary elections; this is a huge driver of partisan polarization—much more so than gerrymandering—and a massive driver of behavior on Capitol Hill, as Members do everything they can to avoid primary challengers, which boils down to never leaving an opening to your party activist flank side.

#26. Related, the shutdown is the latest sign that the congressional Democrats may be in the early stages of a party convulsion along the lines of the 2010s GOP, where an activist wing starts playing ever-increasing hardball in primary elections and on the Hill; there are dozens of political ramifications to this, but one obvious one is that we may get a cycle of Dem primary upsets where an extremist defeats a strong general-election candidate in a swing state, a phenomena the Senate GOP struggled with almost a dozen times in the last 15 years.

#27. There’s little evidence that the shutdown will itself directly affect the 2026 or 2028 federal elections—voters typically have higher priorities on election day than procedural fights in Congress from over a year ago; that, however, understates the role that things like a shutdown play in shaping power dynamics within parties and among candidates, and my guess is that shutdown might come to represent a watershed moment for Dems, pushing out on the margin old-style politicians like Schumer in favor of younger, more combative activist actors.

Cheers,

Matt