Gut Check Time For Democrats
Send this to your senators.
Every lengthy government shutdown in my lifetime has been a consequence of Republican extortion.
The structure and rules of our government all but demand that annual budgeting be a cooperative enterprise, but Republicans have repeatedly attempted to transform it into a vehicle for significant partisan policy change by withholding cooperation unless Democrats cough up one-sided concessions. Ransoms.
In 1995, House Speaker Newt Gingrich refused to fund the government unless the appropriations also included measures cutting Medicare and Medicaid and extending tax cuts to the wealthy.
In 2013, under pressure from far-right Republicans, House Speaker John Boehner refused to fund the government unless the appropriations included a measure to zero out the Affordable Care Act.
In 2018, Donald Trump flipped the order of operations and refused to sign legislation to fund his own government unless Congress attached a measure to finance construction of a wall along the southern border. But extortion was still the name of the game.
(It’s a testament to the asymmetry between the parties that Democrats only ever attempted this once—on a Saturday in 2018, for the loftier purpose of protecting Dreamers—but caved immediately once the weekend was over.)
All of these gambits failed, which is the best argument against the extortion tactic. It doesn’t work. The public relies on government services, and most voters understand who is to blame when they’re interrupted: the party making extraneous demands.
But Democrats have also ascribed to a 30 year old conventional wisdom that parties pay a big political penalty for shutting down the government. That voters penalize the extortionists at the ballot box. This argument against shutdowns is completely fictitious.
It is true that Republicans have suffered significant but fleeting dips in approval during and in the immediate aftermath of their shutdowns. But in 1996, voters “penalized” House Republicans by returning them to the majority. Yes, Bill Clinton won re-election against Bob Dole, an old and charmless challenger, but the congressional elections that year were basically a wash. Republicans lost four seats.
A year after the Ted Cruz-led Obamacare shutdown, Republicans won the 2014 midterms in a landslide.
I suspect only a tiny fraction of Americans even remembered the Trump shutdown when they voted in 2020. It would be laughable to stipulate that Trump only lost re-election because of his 35 day shutdown two years earlier, and in any case, Democrats didn’t exactly rout the GOP five years ago. Joe Biden won by less than 100,000 votes in the decisive swing states. Democrats retained their House majority, but lost 13 seats.
So there’s no discernible, long-term political downside to shutting down the government, even for the malign purpose of trying and failing to extort the opposition. At the moment, though, there are better reasons.