Rehearsals for this year's production of Shutdown Theater are nearing an end, and, with last-minute changes to the script, Democrats are at a loss.
They have no idea how to create a happy ending.
“We may not have the luxury of a victory scenario,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.). “I think what we’re trying to do is avoid things getting worse. I don’t think victory is in anyone’s hopes and dreams in this moment.”
Democrats, under enormous pressure from their hysterical base to "Fight! Fight! Fight!," have decided on the Götterdämmerung approach: blow it all up and pick up the pieces later.
In other words, they don't care if the voters blame them for the shutdown, or so they say.
When Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer was asked if he was willing to shut the government down, he said, “Ask the Republicans if they are willing to shut the government down.”
This is playing directly into President Trump's hands. Trump is so far into the Democrats' heads that now they all think they're billionaires who grew up in New York.
On Friday, Trump told reporters Republicans don’t have to “deal with the Democrats” on spending. This enraged the Democrats (as Trump knew it would) and forced their hand. They are now going to introduce a counterproposal that will add $1 trillion to healthcare spending alone.
“We expect them to come and negotiate and to live up to what they told their voters back in ’24, not even a year ago, what they were going to do, which was lower costs. And health care is a huge part of that,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark told reporters Wednesday.
Many of those demands were included in Democrats’ alternative stopgap released Wednesday. But GOP leaders insist there is no way to cut a deal in the time remaining — even on extending the expiring health subsidies, which has some Republican support. Schumer and Jeffries have been cagey about possibly swallowing a short-term funding punt now in exchange for potential negotiations later.
Asked Wednesday evening if getting a commitment to work on issues like the health care subsidies would be enough to get Democrats on board with a stopgap, Schumer did not definitively reject the idea.
It may be enough for Republicans to commit to negotiations after the stopgap spending bill is passed to avoid a shutdown.
“We have two weeks,” Schumer said. “They should sit down and talk to us and we maybe can get to a good proposal, let’s see. But when they don’t talk to us, there’s no hope of getting to a good proposal.”
It has finally dawned on Schumer that Republicans don't have to knee-walk to his office like supplicants begging for scraps of food. Besides, Democratic senators are not enamored of the whole shutdown idea, realizing the weak political position they're in.
More generally, a sense of gung-ho enthusiasm about a shutdown fight was hard to detect inside the Democratic ranks.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who represents hundreds of thousands of federal workers who would be furloughed in a shutdown, suggested it was a little too early to go to the mattresses.
“What is today — the 17th of September?” he said. “Let’s have a debate about the alternative.”
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democratic leader who joined Schumer to advance the GOP funding bill in March, indicated Wednesday that he expects to vote against Republicans’ proposal this time.
It appears that neither side wants to avoid the shutdown. They've gone through the process enough times to know that the "shutdown" doesn't catastrophically end government services on Oct. 1. The slow-motion shutdown gives both sides a couple of weeks to work something out.
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One interesting scenario would be if Trump were to act like Barack Obama did during shutdowns when he was in office. Obama closed all the national parks, museums, and other popular tourist spots for no reason, just to get a lot of people mad at Republicans.
This time, the anger would be directed at Democrats.
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