Generally its the party that won’t vote for a continuing resolution. Since the easy argument is we offered to just keep it open but they had special interests.
Funny I had the same question regarding what the plan was if they did filibuster the budget. How was this supposed to cause Trump and the Republicans to capitulate? In fact it basically does Trumps dirty work for him. He can just sit back and enjoy the dysfunction while the Dems take the blame rather than him. If there is something he wants to do like say fire everybody in absentia, he just just declare that (e.g. Doge) essential.
The demand shut down the government seems to be basically a demand that the Democrats HAVE TO DO SOMETHING without giving a lot of thought to whether doing this particular thing will help or hurt the situation.
Which, in American living memory, has only ever been one party, so I don’t think we can draw any firm conclusions from that.
What’s stopping him from doing that right now? “We have to keep the government open so Trump won’t be able to do what he’s already doing” is a pretty hollow argument.
The government is ALREADY shut down. Has been since 1/20. The only thing that changed today is that Trump now has even MORE power to arbitrarily shut down any Congressionally allocated spending he doesn’t like.
I think they are insulated by power, wealth and fame. So they know they will be the last people to truly suffer under fascism. By the time the fascists get to them, everyone else will be gone and they’ll probably have flown to some neutral developed nation where they can give fiery speeches from their mansions.
Appeasement is underrated. Sometimes it is a good idea, sometimes not.
And Trump almost surely wants a shutdown. He just would refuse to take blame for it. Then he would declare stuff he likes, like national parks, essential, while keeping stuff he (or Musk) dislikes closed. So Trump would not have felt the normal pressure to compromise to reopen the government.
Also, Schumer did get a pathway to restore the gutting of the D.C. public schools.
Which Democrats could have used against him. “Trump is governing like a king and keeping the services you need closed by choice. Call your Republican representatives and tell them to pass a better budget so we can restore the rule of law”. That’s a winning talking point.
Instead, we’re trying to prevent him from impounding the entire federal budget by voting to give him power to impound the entire federal budget.
Not the most important aspect of this, but if the Democrats had a leader who had a handle on their caucus and genuinely thought it made sense to help the GOP keep the government open, they would absolutely engineer it so that the motion had just enough votes that Rand Paul would’ve been the 60th, and then put the GOP in a bind where they probably need to give some concession to him, then kick it back to the house and go into a shutdown for a few days entirely because they left it till the last minute.
If it is a winning talking point, the shutdown would not have much changed that.
Why haven’t we been seeing news reports that telephone answering times at the IRS and social security are skyrocketing? Answer: So far, they are exempting telephone staff from cuts. During a shutdown, this would still be true.
I guess that if there had been a shutdown, progressives could have sued the government for keeping non-essential but popular activities open and for paying those staffers, It would have looked bad for progressive organizations to do that, and I wonder who would have standing to sue. Maybe a legal eagle here can suggest how this would have worked.
Actually, they WERE going to cut the phone staffers until it was reported in the media and there was an outcry.
But hey, it sure is a good thing that Democrats passed a budget that’ll make it even easier for him to do that once he declares the Washington Post illegal.
Pelosi doesn’t quote AOC, because AOC represents an extreme wing of the Democratic Party. No worries -AOC is a solid communicator - but she doesn’t represent the Democrats. For now at least.
I like AOC. I also like Pelosi. Both play their role well.
They had nowhere near that leverage. Trump and Musk could have used the shutdown to fire anyone they wanted to fire, and declare MAGA loyalists to be essential workers.
My take was that they had some leverage and they acted like they had zero leverage. The Dems got… nothing, zilch. Josh Marshall wanted a set of straight up and down votes - no fillibustering - on all the things that DOGE did. Make the GOP own it or overturn it. Their choice. That would be consistent with vaguely lawful behavior. I’m not sure they had that sort of leverage - I suspect they would have been turned down - but it would have been clarifying to show that the Republican Congress was afraid of supporting Trump and afraid of standing up to him.
I assumed that any shutdown would be short and wholly unnecessary if the House GOP didn’t pull stunts.
It literally is a “fight for democracy” against an aspirant demagogue who told everybody he planned to be a dictator (“only for Day One”, as of course strongmen leaders always step down as they promise), and a cosplay fascist billionaire who openly bought his way into presidential influence and is now using his access to literally dismantle entire government agencies while trying to gaslight the American public into believing that he isn’t responsible for any of it. So of course enough Democrats capitulated to pass a continuing resolution because they don’t seem to understand that what they most fear has already come to pass, and being ‘blamed’ for a government shutdown is the least of their (or the general public’s) worries at this point.
To be quite frank, the house has been on fire for nearly a quarter of a century; it is now starting to collapse in on itself, and Chuck Schumer is over in a corner worrying about a few water stains. Fuck that useless asshole.
So to that I say, the next election is (1) over 18 months away, and (2) Republicans have become the “party of shutdown”, so I’m not sure we know what will actually happen if Dems dig in and show some spine. It seems like we never will, and that’s frustrating.
I am definitely sympathetic to the idea that the “do something, anything” attitude can lead to counterproductive outcomes, it always deserves skepticism because it’s very often just bait. The sausage-making is complicated and usually not pretty.
But we are in a crisis and we need a wartime Democratic party. We need to see that someone is in the fight, and leading it from the front. How else does a party that depends on electoralism expect to turn out voters in the next election? It’s a hard question but I’m pretty sure the answer does not involve the Dems throwing away their only source of leverage with nothing to show for it.