Shutdown failures

Was the shutdown a failure of strategy or a failure of nerve? Yes

When writing about the shutdown deal earlier this week, I characterized it this way: “The shutdown gambit was Senate Democrats drawing to an inside straight. They got the card they needed. And then folded for some reason.”

I’ve now seen some reasonable folks with a lot of expertise in politics (and particularly in congressional politics) write smart things which have offered a different—somewhat more favorable read—on what Democrats were doing. I can broadly group them into two categories:

1. Things were actually quite bad. A few weeks of a shutdown is one thing, but SNAP benefits were about to disappear, lots of people were going to start suffering in a serious way.

2. Democrats never had any hope of extracting meaningful policy concessions. This was doomed from the start. You’re being unrealistic if you think they could have gotten more.

Is ‘winning’ a shutdown worth the suffering it will cause?

The first category is worth taking seriously. It’s clearly true that Trump was the one who was going to get the blame for most of this, especially since he was actively trying to increase the suffering (for example, by not just refusing to disperse SNAP benefits but by going to court to defend his right to deny to withhold money). But I do take the point that Trump’s utter lack of empathy for suffering shouldn’t generate an equal disregard among progressives.

Daniel W. Drezner

had a good piece about the ‘strategy’ at work here

The Madman Theory's Perfect Target

One can give Trump credit for two things during this past month of deadlock: he succeeded in holding the GOP congressional caucus unified, and he made it clear that he did not care about who suffered as a result of the shutdown.

Most Democrats were perfectly willing to dig in their heels, because based on raw politics it hurt Trump more than it hurt themselves. For moderates, however, the economic and psychic pain of those affected by the shutdown outweighed the political gain of holding out even longer.

I don’t have a good solution to this problem. When your political adversary is willing to take his own constituents hostage (to his own political detriment) it can be hard to figure out how to approach the situation

I do think Democrats should consider how they would react to foreign powers who behaved this way. Would they think highly of Europeans who back down to Trump’s wildly unreasonable trade demands? Would they think it’s good strategy for Latin American countries to accede to Trump’s every whim in order to avoid his temper?

Still, I do think there has to be a more serious conversation about the ethics of responsibility in the era of Trump. I’m not a full-blown subscriber to the doctrine of double effect, but I think it’s generally at least worth thinking about. Democrats don’t want people to go hungry. They very much want them to be fed. They also want people to have health care. And to live in a society where appropriations are spent on the thing they were appropriated for.

With Trump, none of those things is guaranteed. In that sort of case, it’s worth thinking some very serious thoughts about whether the juice of ‘normal politics’ is worth the squeeze.

Still, those theoretical principles are just always going to be hard when you can see real people suffering, and you know that you can alleviate that suffering by backing down. I do understand that.

Which really leads us to the second set of arguments.

The shutdown had no plausible victory condition

I will always read anything

Matt Glassman

has to say about congressional politics, and I think his account of the underlying politics of the shutdown is basically right:

With Trump’s popularity falling and the Dems exceeding expectations in the various elections last week, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to wonder why Democrats threw in the towel here, but the general what-the-fuck-were-we-even-doing-this-for sentiment that I’m getting from a lot of liberals is the right question, just posed at the wrong time; shutting down the government was always, at best, the least-worst option, and the endgame was always going to include the Democrats agreeing to reopen the government in exchange for very little, if anything, of substance—and if you didn’t understand that, fine, but it should be apparent that it’s at least plausible now that we are at the high-tide of political value the Dems can wring out of this, and if you think another week, or two, or month of this was going to substantially change it for the better, you need to explain why and how.

I’m also quite sympathetic to these arguments. In fact, they match up quite closely with what I was arguing back in September.

I thought the shutdown was a bad idea since it would never generate any meaningful policy results and I didn’t understand how it could plausibly lead to a successful political outcome. Then, Trump played it so horribly that it was actually harming him. And I was prepared to start eating my hat. Except Democrats chose that precise moment to cave and win...the exact nothing that we all knew they’d get. Because they just weren’t actually willing to be ruthless and exploit their advantage.

Matt also makes an excellent point that the cave here may end up turning a surprisingly ‘successful’ shutdown into an ultimate failure—even beyond the scope of the particular concessions (not) won.

That the activist base of the Dems has returned to being livid at the leadership for how this has ended is not surprising and there’ a good chance Schumer is toast as Senate Dem leader next Congress, which is of course a big turnaround from the heady days of the first two weeks in October; on the other hand, coalition management was probably the driving force that caused the shutdown, and to come out of it with an activist base angrier than you went in can only be seen as as failure of such management.

It does seem notable to me that the folks who are angry at this cave-in are not just the riled up base but also a lot of centrist pundits who are, if anything, even more frustrated at what seems like a wildly mis-calibrated set of priorities. Many of whom are just baffled about what kind of ‘strategy’ is even going on here. Why start the shutdown if you were going to back down anyway, even when it’s succeeding far more than you could have reasonably hoped? Why back down now, immediately after you just won resounding electoral victories? And—perhaps most importantly—why back down when Trump is finally starting to talk about getting rid of the filibuster?

The shutdown DID have a plausible path to victory: ending the filibuster

And this is the essence of things, really.

Because there are enough Senate Democrats who are enamored with the filibuster that they could not countenance a world where it cam under serious threat.

And I think it really was under serious threat. This is also where I start to fundamentally disagree with my colleagues who see the filibuster as a powerful normative force structuring this entire process.

Or to again quote Matt Glassman:

#16. There was no chance the GOP Senators were about to modify the filibuster in order to end the shutdown; that was a fever dream of the odd Trump/liberal coalition last week and a predictable final political argument of Democratic shutdown dead-enders after the deal was cut.

#17. The filibuster is politically beneficial to (1) individual Senators; (2) Senate majority and minority parties; and (3) the Senate as a chamber; the last one in particular is undervalued in public discussion—the Senate wins more than its fair share of House-Senate negotiations because of the filibuster—and it’s one subtle reason why it was easier to nuke the filibuster on nominations. which do not implicate House opinion/negotiations.

#18. Moderate Senators particularly like the filibuster because it (1) makes them players when they are in the minority; and (2) shields them from tough spots when they are in the majority—if you kill the filibuster, they lose their power in the minority and get all the pressure put on them in the majority; in effect, moderates accept overall less policy passing in exchange for policy always moving their direction, regardless of who is in charge.

I think is all true, and a good argument against the plausibility of Republicans ending the filibuster.

I just think there’s a strong counter-argument, which involves pointing to all the other instances of the Republican Congress fully abdicating precious powers for the sake of Trump’s whims.

The Madisonian principle that branches would jealousy guard their own powers, and preserve the mechanisms that sustain those powers, has always faced countervailing partisan pressures. Those pressures got a lot stronger in the 20th century. And there was a cottage industry around executive primacy during the Bush Administration and the War on Terror which hinted at the potential rise of a new ‘imperial presidency.’ But that’s all small potatoes compared to what’s going on these days.

As a result, I’m not particularly interested in treating the filibuster as a meaningful constraint on Trump’s Republican party, which is absolutely willing to bulldoze through any norm they find remotely inconvenient. Nor am I willing to make firm predictions about their behavior based on what should be in the best interests of the institution. The principle that interbranch ambition would counter ambition is far weaker now than it has ever been.

Which means that ‘force the Republicans to remove the filibuster’ was at least a plausible outcome. And it really would have been a success.

Would a Republican Congress unconstrained by the filibuster do some bad stuff? Absolutely, yes. But of all the horrors associated with our present moment, ‘the party that won control of the whole government is able to implement their agenda’ is nowhere close to the top of the list.

Particularly since the Republican agenda is deeply unpopular.

Time and time again, we’ve seen Republicans ‘prevented’ from implementing a horribly draconian policy by Senate Democrats—who end up preserving enough of a popular policy to prevent serious political blowback. Without the safety net of the filibuster, they’d have to really decide if they want to eviscerate popular programs.

They’d certainly do some things which I would find deeply abhorrent, and which would harm real people. I don’t want to minimize that. But at a certain point, when faced with extraordinary circumstances like an administration that doesn’t just consider itself above the law but which doesn’t believe in rule of law as such, you have to ask yourself whether it’s your responsibility to be a collaborator with the other side’s efforts.

Can Democrats win the war with the army they have?

All of which brings us back to the original point. Senate Democrats were never realistically going to have the resolve necessary to stick to this plan. They were always going to cave. And they did.

Which means, I suppose, that I was right all along to doubt that a shutdown could possibly work. Because the people doing the shutdown never actually had any conviction in the need for radical action. All they wanted to do was take the heat off themselves for a bit, and figured this was the least-worst way to do it. And they’re now happy to go return to the status quo of summer 2025, in the hope that we’re still close enough to normal politics for things to resolve themselves somehow.

Maybe they’re right. I hope they’re right. But I’m increasingly doubtful.