AFTER THE SHUTDOWN — NOW WHAT?

As the dust from the record-breaking government shutdown settles – was that just last week? – and outrage over the alleged Democratic surrender fades into the murk of swiftly accumulating news cycles, it seems possible now to make a clear-eyed, more sober assessment of the confrontation and where it leaves the Democratic Party.

And widespread outrage there was, mostly over the failure to force any major concessions from the Republican senate majority, particularly on the party’s singular objective, extension of ACA medical insurance subsidies. This is quite understandable, but with the clarity of hindsight, there is a fundamental question I’d like us to consider, one that should have been raised at the beginning, but I did not see addressed seriously by party leadership or in the media:

How were we thinking, realistically, this would end?

No one has credibly argued that the GOP, especially Trump, was likely to give in completely on the ACA issue. To begin with, the party forcing a federal shutdown has never, ever, succeeded on a legislative goal against determined and united opposition. This quickly became clear as the Administration refused to negotiate and happily turned up the pressure, not to mention the cruelty factor. As if to emphasize its untenable position, towards the end Schumer even floated what might have been the party’s best-case outcome, a one year subsidy extension, only to have it dismissively rejected.

So why bother? In addition to the pressing need to do something, it elevated the ACA issue, highlighting the GOP’s startlingly callous disregard of even their own constituents’ interests, setting it up as a stout campaign cudgel for the midterms. Recall the Texas Democratic state legislators who walked out earlier this year to stall Gov. Abbott’s steroidal gerrymandering. It wasn’t something they could stop outright, but at great personal cost they were able to raise the issue to national attention for weeks, and provided the impetus for Prop. 50 here.

Furthermore, would saving the ACA subsidies even have benefitted the Democrats, politically? It affected Republican voters almost as much as Democrats, and by making it a confrontation the GOP did not want to concede, the Republicans were forced to defend a clearly unpopular position. (To support this point I cite Marjorie T. Greene, although her announced resignation clouds her strategy and motivation a bit).

It had to end eventually, and with a retreat, because the entire exercise was essentially performative. As Ezra Klein pointed out beforehand, the party’s current problem is that it has no actual power, and the lever provided by a shutdown threat is short and brittle, providing little more than a messaging springboard. Practically speaking, such performances all get old at some point, after the point is made, and in this case, as the human and economic costs piled up.

The Left’s inability to understand this situation was glaringly demonstrated by New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, whose preferred outcome was forcing the Senate majority to end the shutdown by overturning the filibuster. Now, a clue that this was a bad idea might have been that Trump himself was pushing for it, but even so, would a post-filibuster nuclear winter, still without ACA subsidies and the brakes off the MAGA congressional train for at least the next year, really have been a victory?

So, it was just a matter of time, and that became ripe when: a) 42 million SNAP recipients started to go hungry, b) air traffic delays threatened to paralyze the national transport system going into The Holidays, and c) the Democrats won resounding, across-the-board victories in the off-year November elections. In retrospect, of course the shutdown ended then. It’s tempting to view both the comedically inept party leadership and its dramatically revolted base as playing well rehearsed roles, if not Oscar-worth ones.

But seriously, where does this leave us? I’d point to at least three significant benefits coming out of the shutdown, some only visible in hindsight:

Three Things Gained

1. There were a few concessions, and while amounting to little in overall value, restoring some SNAP finding cuts and rehiring fired federal works, as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out, is not nothing.

2. The most discussed and ridiculed concession, a LOL-worthy promise to hold a Senate vote on ACA extensions, was not worth the paper it wasn’t written on, but that’s beside the point. It’s a jiujitsu move, performative but in effect a fuse for the time bomb that is the one political achievement of the shutdown, the next confrontation set for late January. The money runs out then and we get to go through this all over again, after the ACA subsidies expire and the Democrats (hopefully) use the intervening time to beat the GOP unmercifully with it.

3. Lastly, Epstein (duh)! The end of the shutdown released the pent-up floodwaters of that issue, which left the GOP waterlogged, its base divided and its leadership humiliated. Although MTG was also apparently swept away, and it was also only a performative issue, it contributes to the cumulative erosion by many recent Trumpian overreaches on the blinders of the center-leaning parts of the MAGA coalition.

   
   

Condemn Schumer and Jeffries all you want – there is good cause to do so, for many other reasons – and more negative energy focused on the leaders may help advance younger members to new positions. But, if you believe the cards could have been played differently, or how they should be in January, please reply with your thoughts, and let’s have a conversation.

Written by Ross Bogan