Twenty Thoughts On Where We Stand

Taking stock of the weirdest shutdown I've observed

Dear Friends,

Right before the shutdown began, I wrote about the ways I thought it would and would not be different than past ones. I also did a Politico piece last week that focused on the unusual structural features of this shutdown that would make it different this time, and it’s literally titled “This Shutdown Won’t Be Like The Others.” So I was definitely prepared for this not to be a rerun of 2013 or 2018.

And yet, I’m still pretty surprised at what I’m seeing.

And so here are twenty scattered thoughts about this weird shutdown.

1. A lot of observers in DC are noting how politically low-key the shutdown seems. I agree. It doesn’t feel at all like 2013, or even 2018. There’s a palpable sense that everyone is just going through the motions. I suggested previously that this might be a function of the partisan alignment—Dems maybe not having the heart to be shutdown crusaders or Republicans the passion to defend essential government services—and I still think that’s a factor. There’s also a sense in DC that this is mostly about leaders mollifying party factions itching for a fight prior to cutting the obvious deal, which definitely increases the kabuki-theater quality of the day-to-day. But none of that fully explain what we’re observing.

   

2. One surprise to me is that the Democrats aren’t owning the shutdown, and instead are trying to pin it on the GOP. That’s silly on the merits—you can’t openly argue for six months in the New York Times Op-Ed pages about whether to purposefully shut the government down and then pretend you didn’t do it—but it’s also inconsistent with the entire focusing-event strategy theory of the case. If the point of your shutdown is to stop playing “normal” politics in order to sound the alarm-bells and focus the nation on Trump’s power-grabbing blowup of the appropriations process, it seem odd to deny you are even doing it. But here we are.

   

3. Part of the confusion is that the blowup of the bipartisan appropriations process is legitimately not the Democrats’ fault, but is also a distinctly different issue than the shutdown per se. Here’s how I sort out my thinking about this:

   1. The reason the FY2026 appropriations aren’t even close to being done on time is that traditional bipartisan negotiations have gone completely off the rails. And that’s because Trump (and, to a lesser but still important extent, the congressional GOP) has rescinded, pocket-rescinded, psuedo-impound, and maybe actually-impounded previously-appropriated funds. That makes it impossible to have the normal bargaining process over future funding. Hence, even more need than usual for a CR.

   2. But all of that could be addressed with the government open; the party trying to attach external policy demands to the clean CR that would re-open the government is the Dems. They are the hostage-takers, and since no one will (or should) reward shutdown hostage-taking, they are the reason the government is staying shut down.

   3. These two things, of course, are purposefully being muddled by both parties. The easiest way to succinctly untangle it to say this: Trump and the GOP are responsible for blowing up the longstanding norms and logic of the appropriations process, but the Democrats are the ones who caused the current shutdown, and are the ones preventing the government from reopening under a short-term CR.

      

4. You might respond to this by saying, “but Matt, if Dems don’t shut the government, how will they ever fix the blown-up appropriations process?” That’s a fair question. The problem there is that the shutdown politics themselves are now only minimally related to the blowup of the appropriations-process, which has become a distant second (or third) concern, and it seems obvious that the Democrats intend to consent to reopening the government before those issues get solved. In part because they have no hope of winning on them via shutdown, but also in part because they aren’t even particularly trying to win on them.

   

5. Instead, the Dems are engaging in a novel twist on the classic hostage-taking policy shutdown, over the extension of ACA subsidies, simultaneously demanding policy concessions in exchange for their votes on the clean CR and denying they are the ones keeping the government closed. On it’s face, it frankly doesn’t make a lot of sense to disown the tactic. And it’s definitely not past practice. The big 2013 and 2018 shutdowns were dumb and hopeless causes that also didn’t make a lot of sense, but they did feature factions self-admittedly shutting the government down in attempt to leverage that reality to win policy concessions. That, of course, was a political dynamic born of party logic—those shutdowns were truly dead-ends as policy endeavors—but the theory of the tactic was logical, at least in theory.

   

   The proper terminology for the situation!

   

6. Here we have a very different dynamic: the Democrats are chasing policy concessions that are very gettable. There was simply no way Obama was going to agree to repeal Obamacare, and the Dems in 2018 were not giving in on the wall funding. But ACA subsidy extensions are definitely something that may very well have happened even without a shutdown. They are important to a lot of GOP constituents, and moderate Republicans (and party leaders) were/are definitely looking to cut a deal on them, defuse the issue, and avoid the public blowback over insurance prices.

   

7. And so we have a really, really weird dynamic at play here. There’s an actual existential appropriations crisis right now at the heart of all this, but it’s masquerading as a policy negotiation over something many people expected to get settled anyway. At the same time, we’ve got a very normal and likely-solvable dispute over health care policy masquerading as an existential crisis worthy of shutting the government down!

   

8. This is the main reason, in my view, the whole shutdown feels low-key in DC. Everyone expects the immediate policy dispute to ultimately get solved without too much difficulty once the government reopens, but no one is really even talking about the underlying crisis, because no one thinks it can possibly get solved under the current political dynamics.

   

9. Another big surprise: the Democrats aren’t taking the shutdown on the chin, at least not yet. Public opinion right now puts more blame on Trump and the GOP. And while the shutdown polling isn’t as great for the Dems as some people are making it out to be—both parties are getting bad reviews, here, which is normal in a shutdown—they have absolutely succeeded in not losing during the first week. The bad news is that might lengthen the shutdown, as it certainly has energized and emboldened a lot of elected Dems.

   

10. What’s going on here? One possibility is the hardening of partisan approval ratings has completely attenuated things. Trump is woefully unpopular, and so public opinion will register against him in any dispute right now. That is probably at work. But as Josh Huder and Jonathan Bernstein point out in two very nice write-ups, Trump and the GOP are currently getting their lunch handed to them in the messaging/framing game. The correct game theory strategy for the GOP is not difficult. Say you are willing to negotiate on the ACA subsidies, demand the government reopen as a pre-condition to those negotiations, and point out all the pain of the shutdown. Rinse and repeat

    

11. But Trump is completely asleep at the switch here and the administration is undermining it’s own case. I’d say he can’t stay on message, but he doesn’t even seem to be thinking much about the shutdown. He’s busy deploying troops to various cities and declaring them war zones. Meanwhile, when he does talk about the shutdown, he’s using it as an excuse to leverage his own ideological goals, threatening mass layoffs and funding cuts across the government. Russ Vought is out there blocking apportionments of funds and getting into battles with GOP Senators over them.

    

12. If Trump had done a national oval office address, laser-focused his public commentary and attention on reopening the government, and skipped all the talk (and action) about using the shutdown strategically, he’s almost certainly on better political footing. Instead, he’s muddied the water about who is trying to leverage the shutdown here. And he’s proudly owning his side of that.

    

13. Congressional Republicans are doing better, but best I can tell only Thune is really staying disciplined to the obvious winning message about reopening the government. Everyone else is talking about health care for illegal immigrants, which might be an important issue but just distracts from the core message. And ultimately helps the Democrats, who are desperate to make the public debate about health care rather than about the government being closed.

    

    Not a great sign when you can get even money odds on a 3-week shutdown

    

14. And yes, a lot of credit to the Democratic leadership. The leaders have managed to channel the anti-Trump energy into a policy fight on their best issue rather than a procedural dispute snooze-fest that would have done zero ratings with the public. I’m frankly shocked at the message discipline we are seeing from the Dems—I thought they would be all over the place—and I’m also pretty amazed they’ve been able to get the public attention off the government being closed and onto the substance of their taken-hostage.

    

15. That said, it’s early. And shutdowns aren’t static stalemates. They pressure to end builds as time passes. Civilian feds are going to miss a paycheck on Friday, and uniformed servicemembers are going to miss one next Wednesday. Various government programs are going to run out of non-appropriated funds in short-order, brining more pain to people who depend on those services. More and more people will be inconvenienced by long airport lines or slow call-center response times. This time next week, the blowback could easily have shifted to the Democrats.

    

16. Still, this could go a while. If I had to bet—and you definitely can if you think you know something the public doesn’t—I would target the middle of next week as the early end of the window for this ending. But the partisan political arrangement gives me pause. The Dems certainly seem locked in right now and enjoying the health care debate; they don’t seem too worried right now about more Senators getting peeled off in the ongoing CR votes. And the GOP hardly seems particularly upset with the government agencies closed, I think a lot of them see the missed-paycheck for the military might be an opinion turning point.

    

17. The terms of the end of the shutdown are still clear. Senate Dems will agree to unconditionally reopen the government, Republicans will offer good-faith handshake deals (but no written terms) to negotiate the ACA extenders. The public politics might move things marginally (will the GOP win more/less of a concession on reducing eligibility for the subsidies? Will the Dems get the ACA fix closer to the open-enrollment start date?) but messing with the presidential power issues that were once-upon-a-time-and-still at the root of all this won’t be addressed. I can very vaguely imagine some sort of handshake deal on norms about the ICA rescissions (pocket or otherwise), but there is little chance they are formally rolling back executive spending grabs, and certainly zero they are doing as part of the deal to reopen the government.

    

18. Another open question is the leadership/factions dynamic. If you take the view that a lot of this is an exercise in coalition management (as I do), the person in the most precarious position now is probably Speaker Johnson, who is likely going to have to eventually navigate the conference politics of moving the ACA extension in the House while a big portion of his party oppose it. He’ll need Trumps help, and he’ll get it. But it won’t be pleasant for him.

    

19. I’m basically never surprised when Senators take the low-effort path of least resistance, but it did strike me as odd how little effort Thune and the GOP are putting into making all this procedurally uncomfortable for Senate Dems. We keep getting side-by-side votes on the party CR’s, but mostly the Senate is functioning as normal, processing judges and whatever else they might do on a typical session day. It’s true that getting Senators to stick around for weekend votes is more or less impossible unless you have a crisis and a chance at solving it, but I still figured we’d see more of an effort to leverage the floor and the schedule to inconvenience the Democratic filibuster.

    

20. To end on an aside, I’ve been thinking a lot about one a paragraph from one of my favorite books, David Potter’s The Impending Crisis, his magisterial history of the1850s. Speaking about the secession crisis, he writes:

    The old Union in 1860-1861 lacked the national press services, the network of electronic media, the large corps of public information specialists, and the array of news magazines which today would saturate public attention with an issue as urgent as secession. But in 1860, Congress was the only agency that held national affairs in any kind of national focus. It was out of session in November 1860, when the secession crisis began, and the country was ill-prepared to understand the situation, even for many weeks after Congress convened in December.

    I increasingly feel like this is a very specific mid-20th century view of mass information in small-d democratic politics (Impending Crisis was published in 1977), when the focusing ability of professional national media was at its zenith. Our current politics is—thankfully—not the secession crisis, but with the 20th century gatekeepers dead and gone, it’s not obvious to me that Potter’s reassuring tone still holds. The subsequent splintering, decentralization, and democratization of mass information in the last 30 years has, at least partially, destroyed the ability of anyone to saturate public attention in the face of an urgent issue. Game of Thrones never had the ratings of Major Dad, and no political crisis will have Walter Cronkite setting the table stakes, or even identifying it as a crisis. I remain in the liberal free-speech absolutist camp, but the need for such gatekeeps (recently made here by Richard Hanania) remains the hardest argument to dismiss on the other side.

Cheers,

Matt