The United States is headed to a near-inevitable government shutdown starting on October 1. Photo / Getty Images
For only the second time since President Donald Trump took office in January, Democrats who are out of power in Washington find themselves in a situation where they have actual leverage to block him and his party.
This time, they plan to use it.
As a result, the United States is headed to a near-inevitable government shutdown starting on October 1, when a new financial year begins.
Especially for a minority party, this is a tricky path that will require discipline and focus if it is to prevail in winning the concessions it’s demanding while convincing the public that Democrats are doing the right thing and holding the high ground.
Terms of engagement were set last week.
The House, on party lines, passed a funding patch known as a continuing resolution that would keep the government open until around November 21.
Republicans describe it as a “clean” bill because it keeps funding at current levels. It did make a few changes, one of them being money to provide more security to officials in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing.
In the Senate, the bill required 60 votes to move forward. That is seven more than Republicans have.
Democrats in the upper chamber proposed their own alternative, which would extend only to October 31.
It constituted a list of demands:
After both bills failed in the Senate, to no one’s surprise, Congress headed out of town for a recess.
Senators are not expected to return until September 29, just a day before the end of the financial year.
The House is not scheduled to be back until two days later, when a shutdown would presumably be under way.
Democrats faced a similar situation and set of choices in March.
Then, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-New York) infuriated many in his party by corralling enough votes on his side to keep the government open without getting any policy concessions from the Republicans in return.
His calculation was that a shutdown would be more damaging.
Indeed, that has often been the case in the past when one party gets blamed.
However, much has changed since those early days of the Trump Administration - chiefly, a realisation of how far the President intends to carry his agenda, and how little regard he has for the constitutional prerogatives of Congress.
“I’m not going to write a blank cheque for a lawless president. That is my starting point here,” Senator Chris Van Hollen (Maryland) said in an interview, expressing the sentiments of many of his Democratic colleagues.
While Schumer has complained that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) has not engaged in negotiations with Democrats, Van Hollen points out that any real concessions would have to come from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
“This is all about Donald Trump. The question is whether Donald Trump will be willing to have a negotiation,” Van Hollen contended.
“He is calling all the shots for the Republicans in Congress. They have surrendered their constitutional duties to him. They have become rubber stamps.”
Yesterday, Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) released a letter to Trump demanding that he meet them ahead of the funding deadline to avert a shutdown.
Trump has yet to hold a single policy discussion with the leaders of the opposition party since he began his second term. It underscores the go-it-alone path the President has forged with Republicans in Congress.
Democrats around the country have been demanding such a show of resistance from their leaders in Washington.
“I’m on Team Fight,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) told me when I interviewed him recently at the Cap Times Idea Fest in Madison, Wisconsin.
“You don’t think Republicans would use every ounce of leverage they would have in this circumstance?”
But he also cautioned that Democrats in Washington must be “very specific about what it is they want”.
“Democrats are not going to be able to say, ‘Can you reverse everything you’ve done in the last eight months?’” Pritzker said.
“I can name you seven or 10 things Republicans have done I would like to see reversed. In fact, all of it probably,” he added. “But I’m just suggesting to you we’re not going to win seven or 10 of these.”
He argued Democrats must keep their focus on healthcare cuts, which he said are the most dangerous thing the Republicans are doing.
It is also true that healthcare is one of the issues important to voters on which they still trust Democrats more than Republicans, as the centre-left group Third Way pointed out in a September 10 strategy memo.
What should get more emphasis, the group argued, is the sharp hike in healthcare premiums that will come with the end of Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Its analysis shows they will fall hardest on working- and middle-class Americans in Republican-leaning states.
“In red states, 8.5% of residents have benefitted from an ACA tax credit this year, compared to just 3.2% of residents in blue states won by [Kamala] Harris,” Third Way wrote in a memo published on Saturday.
An imperative for Democrats now is to impress on Americans’ very specific consequences of Trump’s policies, said Senator Chris Coons (D-Delaware).
In effect, he added, a shutdown of government and what it provides its citizens has already been under way through the implementation of Trump’s policies.
In his state, for example, both the most urban and most rural hospitals are heavily dependent on money from Medicaid and face a real danger of shutting down if that funding is slashed.
And tens of thousands of his constituents would see sharp rises in their healthcare costs if premium subsidies are allowed to expire.
“Part of our challenge is lots of people haven’t felt that yet, but they will next month,” Coons said.
Yes, there will be blame flying back and forth if the government closes, as is now expected.
Americans will see an interruption of the nonessential services that so many of them rely upon.
Past experiences - there have been many - show their tolerance will be stretched, especially if this one goes on for a long time.
The challenge for Democrats now is convincing the country that the cost of not using their party’s leverage would have been greater.
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