13 thoughts on the end of the shutdown

It’s about the filibuster much more than health care

1. In the week before the government shutdown, I spoke to many Democrats in Congress who endorsed the shutdown strategy but didn’t actually believe it would work. They anticipated that Democrats would face backlash from the public, leading to immediate pressure to surrender, and they mostly hoped that they would not personally need to issue the surrender votes and tempt backlash from their own base. Instead it worked — the public mostly blamed Trump.

2. That’s because Republicans have the White House and both houses of Congress, Trump seems like a reckless guy, and he’s obviously not someone who feels tightly constrained by laws or norms. He literally demolished the East Wing of the White House because he felt like it. People hold him responsible for outcomes.

3. With the recent SNAP fracas, he in fact leaned in to being responsible for outcomes. The decision to interpret the shutdown as requiring him to block nutrition benefits was made by him alone, and he went to court to enforce it.

4. What’s missing from the online anger at Democrats is that a lot of the people I’ve spoken to, both in Congress and in the policy community, were genuinely very stressed out about the harm the shutdown was doing to the country, including lost wages and disrupted air travel. Politically, this is perverse — the public blames Trump for the shutdown, so the worse conditions became in America, the better the political outcome for Democrats.

5. One reason Democrats felt guilty about this, nonetheless, is that lots of them didn’t really believe their own spin. The public blamed Trump, but they blamed themselves and felt bad.

6. Jeanne Shaheen’s group that led these talks has been widely characterized as “moderates.” But I find a style of moderation in which you vote to ban internal-combustion-engine cars and won’t support a voter ID law but then shy away from procedural hardball to be absurd. If you look at the Majority Democrats roster of Michael Bennet, Ruben Gallego, and Elissa Slotkin in the Senate (plus current Senate candidates James Talarico and Angie Craig), they are all against the deal and instead offer some gestures of heterodoxy on questions of public policy.

7. Nervous Democrats hoped that Election Day would be a turning point: either Democrats would come up short and that would be the proof they needed to cave, or Democrats would do well and Republicans would feel pressure to throw them a bone on health care.

8. Instead, Trump said the shutdown was hurting Republicans and that the solution was for Republicans to use the nuclear option and either “terminate the filibuster” (his words) or create some kind of carveout for continuing resolutions or appropriations bills.

9. This became, in the eyes of the appropriators and institutionalists of the Senate Dem caucus, the real stakes. Winning on health care was off the table and their fight had become about the future of the appropriations process. A shutdown might drag on for weeks and might pull Trump’s numbers further down, but the endgame would be a rule change and partisan appropriations bills, not a win for Democrats on health care.

10. I’ve been arguing for filibuster reform for more than twenty years now, starting with a G.O.P.-controlled Senate, so I am simply not sympathetic to the view that Democrats needed to abandon a winning political tactic in order to preserve the precious bipartisanship of the appropriations process. But that was the actual choice that induced critical senators to blink, and you shouldn’t let overheated rhetoric obscure that.

11. Don’t miss that, having saved the precious appropriations process, what’s been agreed to here is passage of a few relatively minor appropriations bills, plus a continuing resolution through the end of January. Some version of this drama may well recur in February.

12. Because this is really all on some level about the filibuster, I want to say in an earnest way that I think debate about which party is “helped” by supermajority rules is a bit childish. Both sides would get to pass some high-polling items that the opposition party objects to, and both sides would also have to admit to their base that some of the stuff they’ve been promising isn’t actually viable. I think that would be a win for the country, not a zero-sum transfer from one party to the other — politics would be a little less dysfunctional and insane.

13. Senators hate this, though, because the filibuster really does give individual members more leverage and make things less leadership driven, which helps make being a senator more fun than being a House member. Is that a good reason to blink at a critical moment in American history? I’m skeptical.