A few weeks ago, Ezra Klein, the liberal columnist influence the Timesactually called on the Democrats to close the government, in an editorial, “stop acting as it is normal”. He looked back in March, when Chuck Schumer, the head of the Senate minority, rallied enough votes to help the government opened before a previous financing date; The democratic basis yelled in rage, but Schumer argued that a judgment was likely to weaken President Donald Trump’s controls and empower Elon Musk and the government’s Ministry of Efficiency to flow through federal agencies. Klein agreed that these were reasonable positions at the time, but now he argued, times have changed. The existing borders on the power of Trump seem to be weak anyway, and its presidency has left its stage of “food speed” – a blitz of actions aimed at overwhelming opponents – and in a phase of “authoritarian consolidation” that Democrats cannot in all conscience. A closure, Klein wrote, would transform the “diffuse crisis” of Trump’s corruption into an “acute crisis” which pays popular attention-although the party, he conceded, would need a strong message.
According to PuckKlein’s argument led a frantic discussion between the Democrats at the Congress, who were not all on board. (A Democrat in the House said, succinctly, “fuck ezra.”) The most agreed, however, that there would be Being a closure this fall, whether when financing the government has exhausted, on September 30, or following a temporary extension of this deadline, and the only question remaining was whether the party’s message would highlight Trump’s constitutional abuses – a crisis that was to be addressed, for some; An elite sop Times Readers, for others – or a portfolio problem such as health care. It quickly became clear that the Democrats planned to go on the carpet on the latter, demanding a guaranteed extension of subsidies at the expiration of Obamacare and a reversal of cups in Medicaid and other health programs that the Republicans adopted in their only major bill this summer. They also rejected one of the aforementioned constitutional abuses: aggressive attempts of the administration to usurp the expenses of the congress. Last week, Russell Vought, the chief architect of this effort, warned (or, perhaps, promised) that the administration would use a closure to promulgate permanent cuts in the federal labor. The Democrats rejected the threat to the somewhat contradictory reason that the administration cannot legally prosecute it, and that it has already dismissed workers anyway; Hakeem Jeffries, the head of the House minority, described Vought a “clever political hack”, to make a good measure. Trump agreed to meet Schumer and Jeffries, then canceled, then accepted again. The meeting on Monday did not give a contract. Subsequently, Trump published a video generated by AI-Ai depicting Jeffries with a sombrero and a mustache, alongside Schumer, which could be heard, in a false voice, promising health care to “illegal extraterrestrials” which “cannot even speak English” and therefore “will not realize that we are only a little shit.”
At this point, the Bible Beltway Politico had proclaimed that a closure was “almost inevitable”. John Thune, the head of the majority of the Senate, refused to move the position that, although the Republicans are open to discuss health care with Democrats, they would only do it with the open government; Mike Johnson, the president of the room, did not even recall the room in session before the closing deadline. Yesterday, a vote on a republican plan to extend funding until November took off a few senators who were caucus with the Democrats, but still dropped five votes from the threshold of sixty necessary vote; A democratic counterpropal failed with a broader margin. Trump said that “a lot of good” could come from a closure if it allowed the government to make “irreversible” cuts to the programs that Democrats love and have published another racist video from Jeffries, this time with a group of Mariachi generated by AI, playing in the background. A minute after midnight, the government has indeed missed funds. The end is not yet in sight.
The history of government closings has seriously started in the nineteen eighteen years. Even then, they were generally short and often turned around a handful of problems. Not there was A problem all the time: in 1982, the government briefly closed because legislators were otherwise engaged in social functions and fundraising. In 1995, the Congress Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, triggered the first closure of a significant duration – it would continue for three weeks – on a large dispute of expenses with the Clinton administration. (Gingrich was also upset, apparently, to have to use a rear door to land the funeral flight of the former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.) In 2013, the Republicans again closed the government, this time for a little more than two weeks, in an attempted funding from Obamacare. The longest closure to date – the course of five days – has come to the first term of Trump, as part of an attempt to strengthen the financing of its border wall. (Before that, Schumer had closed the government for the treatment of the Dreamers, but he sold after a few days, when the GOP offered a separate vote.)
In each of these three main cases, the part forcing the question did not obtain what it wanted and also took the biggest share of the blame among the public. (The separate vote on dreamers has never come either.) Over the years, several theories have emerged to explain how the closures are won and lost. A former Clinton assistant suggested once it is difficult for Congress opponents to beat a president in office, given his much greater capacity to correct attention, but Trump then managed to defeat himself in the closing of the wall funding. (This probably did not help when Trump, during a television meeting with Democratic leaders, said: “I will be I who will do it. But Schumer did not do it, as far as dreamers are concerned. It may simply be that the problem forcing the problem has a structural disadvantage. Closers” do not work, “said political scientist Matthew Glassman Times recently. Each time, the resistant side demanded “a reopening of the government while emphasizing all the ways whose closure injured federal workers and American citizens. Finally, the closure coalition cracked, the government has reopened, they did not win their major policy objectives, and they were worse in the future. “
Various liberal commentators agreed, following Klein’s test, that a closure was a bad idea for the Democrats. And yet, as the deadline is looming, there were also legitimate reasons to temper such defeatism. To start, several first surveys suggested that voters were ready to blame the Republicans this time; The party, after all, controls the White House and the two chambers of the Congress, and the closures do not often occur in such conditions. Although the long -term political consequences of closures have been challenged in the past, it is not really clear that the Republicans have paid a lasting price for those they triggered in 1995 and 2013; Indeed, one could say that, although the two fail in a substantial sense, they helped to establish a mythology – without compromise, which pleads at the base, it seems to have helped the long -term party. If the Democrats end up blaming themselves for this closure, will anyone really care in mid-term, a thousand and one of new scandals from now? Will anyone be even remember?
