I want to write one more thing, before it’s too late, about the approach Democrats should take in the run-up to this month’s government funding deadline. A point I’ve made or tried to make in earlier newsletters has been lost in the backlash to their handling of the negotiations, and if it were clearer in people’s minds, Democrats would be less likely to make a huge mistake.
It boils down to this: Democrats should withhold their votes for an annual budget, but only to ensure that they aren’t funding lawlessness, or cutting a deal that Republicans will renege on. That’s it. An approach like that will still allow them to make many concrete demands, in itemized form, at least as an opening bid. But they should not, under any circumstances, take hostages: They should not withhold their votes unless Republicans cough up extraneous policy concessions (clean-energy standards? DACA codification? health-care tax credits?) that have nothing to do with the budget itself. Any demands they make should advance the narrow goal: no breaking the deal, no breaking the law.
This distinction is critical. It’s what makes (or would make) this shutdown fight different in kind from the go-nowhere shutdown fights of the past. In all past instances, the culpable party—that is, the Republican Party—would reach outside the four-corners of annual spending negotiations to demand unrelated ransoms, and this would color the public’s sense of who to blame. Who’s causing the shutdown? It’s the person making arbitrary demands.
If Democrats withhold their votes until Republicans re-expand Medicaid, or pony up health-coverage subsidies, they will be causing the shutdown, because those measures have nothing to do with the annual budget. By contrast, if Democrats withhold their votes because Trump insists on the right to renege, and to use appropriated funds to break the law, he will be the one insisting on a concession—impunity for king-like power—that has nothing to do with the annual budget. He will be to blame.
I know this distinction is lost, because when well-informed Beltway veterans analyze the issue publicly, they tend to miss it altogether. Here’s Brendan Buck—who advised House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan through two GOP shutdowns—treating today’s standoff as indistinguishable from past ones.
“I've been through a lot of government shutdowns,” he said Monday on MSNBC.
They never work out well for the party that triggers the government shutdown. I've been through two where we sat there for literally almost a month.
It didn't end when we got something out of it. Democrats didn't give us something. Obama didn't repeal Obamacare when we shut down the government in 2013.
It just ended when we got our face kicked in for long enough. That's what happens every single time. I don't know exactly what they think they're going to get out of it.
You can make a point. If the whole idea is just to make a point, that's fine. Make a point, but just know you're not getting anything out of it and you're putting a pretty significant cost on the country to make that point by shutting down the government.
Notice his premise: A shutdown will only ensue if Democrats “trigger” one by insisting on “getting” something out of it, the way Republicans in 2013 tried to “get” Obamacare repealed as a condition of passing an annual budget. And that approach always fails.
That approach does always fail. But the analogy to 2013 only holds if Democrats make extraneous policy demands. We’ve never seen a shutdown rooted in a dispute over whether the president should be able to treat the law as advisory.
Yet the rest of that panel seemed to view the proposition the same way Buck did.
Michael Steele, the former RNC chairman and cohost of the show, proposed a shutdown fight over delivering government services, feeding “children who are in need.”
“Republicans have cleaved a third of the government away from the American people, even though this government does not function properly, now the government cannot deliver services. This government cannot take care of children who are in need. This government cannot feed those who are in need.
This government has no role to play in the rest of the world, right? You can't message that? Seriously?”
Other panelists mentioned money for ICE vehicles, a prohibition on Trump’s cryptocurrency bribe funnel, and SNAP benefits.
These are all worthy goals in the abstract. But in a government shutdown fight, they are losers. They deprive Democrats of the ability to say, honestly, we’re not asking for anything for us; we’re only asking that he not break the deal, and not break the law.
PATSY CAKE
That’s a problem, because the point here is to win—to set forth germane and unobjectionable conditions, so that Republicans have to negotiate in good faith, or shut down the government. And public perception of who’s to blame for instigating the shutdown is perhaps the main factor in determining who wins.