I think the idea that they used "males" instead of "trans women" was a deliberate choice. We don't need to pretend that typing out "trans women" was too onerous for them.
The idea that someone could be so engaged enough to know the impact that trans issues has on politics, but not enough to know that calling trans women males is hurtful goes beyond my level of charity.
I'm not asking for them to be banned, I'm saying they deliberately made their argument less clear to be hurtful and they should be called out for that.
If I'm wrong and they hear this feedback and make efforts to avoid that language again I'll eat crow and say I was too aggressive in reading their intentions. But I bet they won't do that.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read some of the discourse on this. Making Trump look bad is just a clearly bad reason to shut down the government. If Republicans started using government money to take out paid political ads against Democrats, that would rightly be seen as a corrupt misuse of taxpayer dollars. But here the Democrats are wasting billions on a marketing stunt.
My thinking on this is influenced by the fact that I work for a government contractor. Myself and my colleagues worked hard to limit the inefficiency caused by the shutdown, but we weren't able to deliver as much value for the taxpayer money because of the shutdown and things would have gotten a lot worse if it had lasted a few more weeks.
I'm also not persuaded that the expanded ACA subsidies are right on the merits. I would be interested if someone could point me to some cost benefit analysis on that topic. With interest rates high, we need to think carefully about cost-benefits of spending and return ACA spending to Obama levels does not seem like a far-right position to me.
If Matt's argument is that it is worth it to get rid of the filibuster, that's a take that seems at least remotely plausible and would be interested to hear him make that more clearly. But voting against cloture because you don't think you should be allowed to vote against cloture and want to make the harm so apparently that the right is taken away seems like a poor argument to me.
Agree with so much of this post, but my only pushback is portraying senators like Slotkin and Bennett as Dems who have responded to these tradeoffs especially well. Slotkin is the Senator for Michigan, so I think it's fair to assume she voted to reverse California's EV mandate for the benefit of the car companies in her home state. Similarly, did Bennett speak out against capping LNG exports because he's OK taking a short-term loss for the long-term gain of an "all-of-the-above" energy policy? Or because that ban hurts his state's many natural gas producers? Those two examples actually strike me as very similar to Spanberger's shutdown calculus of being unwilling to sacrifice niche interests in your home state to align with broader public opinoin — just on more under-the-radar issues. Ultimately, I like the outcome of both votes so I think it's completely correct to view them as good proof-points, but I would like to see movement on issues where those cross-cutting pressures aren't there before I buy too much of what Slotkin and Bennett are selling on moderation.
When you noted that the alternative to reopening the government was "simply pushing the country into a cascading series of air-traffic-control problems, loss of income for SNAP families, and financial hardship for federal workers," I thought for a moment that you were making the case for reopening. However, you went on to write, "I think the 'push the country into hardship' option made political sense because, as far as we can tell, voters were blaming Trump for the shutdown [a misleading gloss], so hardship would reduce his popularity and reduce his political power." Then you stated, "I was happy to bite that bullet."
Let's recall where the metaphor "bite the bullet" came from and what it therefore means. Years ago, a wounded soldier would be given something (apocryphally a bullet) to bite down on while enduring surgery without anesthesia. So bullet-biting is done by the people in pain, not by those who deem it expedient to be "a bit cold-hearted" and keep the pain coming.
Also, let's go easy on the word "winning" in reference to our (Democrats') position during the shutdown. Being the somewhat less-blamed party (not even the dramatically less-blamed one) is an unimpressive example of winning; and that's if the blame gap doesn't close as the shutdown drags on and people start losing their objectivity. I wouldn't bet on that. I think it's more likely that the Democratic Party's traditional constituency would come to feel betrayed.
Michael Powell, almost alone, bucks the "just when we were winning" outcry in "The Moral Cost of the Democrats' Shutdown Strategy" (The Atlantic, Nov. 11).
I'm very biased because my spouse and my I are both Federal workers in Northern VA, and especially because my spouse's entire office was about to be laid off if not for the last minute protections Tim Kaine negotiated into the deal. So, Tim Kaine saved my family's livelihood and career prospects, so, selfishly, big thanks, Tim!
But less selfishly: Large scale unilateral (and almost certainly illegal) government layoffs are bad, and stopping them is good, not just for us Feds but also for the country! Who does the weather forecasts? Who does the disaster response? Who provides the economics data? Matt cares about this stuff --- he's written about the importance of good econ data, and about the need for better state capacity. Well, one way to preserve both those things is to stop the unilateral layoffs of career civil servants.
I am very frustrated by the "Dems cached for nothing" line. Maybe it's not a ton, but no federal layoffs is (1) not nothing, and (2) not just a carve out to a specific constituency.
As far as I can tell the soi-disant prohibition against layoffs is a. completely unenforceable, and b. only applies until January anyway, so I would not exactly start taking those resumes down just yet.
The filibuster is what’s broken about the broken system. People repeatedly vote for change that keeps not happening, and the filibuster is why. What little does squeak through is enshittified by the filibuster: by the phase-ins and sunsets required to shoehorn it into the rarer-than-a-lunar-eclipse reconciliation bills that can avoid the filibuster to pass under majority rule.
The minority wants the filibuster to monkey-wrench the majority and the majority tolerates being monkey wrenched for fear of becoming the next minority with no ability to do the same. So we shamble along, broken promise after broken promise, until half the voters don’t even bother, and arguably most of those who still do are only doing so to block the other side from winning anything.
If the Democratic Party rearranged its polices to be more in line nationally with voters' beliefs and concerns, then they might be in danger of achieving electoral victory. Somewhere along the line Democrats forgot that we live in a democracy where you have to actually listen to voters.
If we're assuming, as the article evidently does, that Democrats were never going to get their policy demand, only hurt Trump's approval ratings, then to me it seems desirable that politicians would be responsible enough to prioritize having the government open over scoring political points. But I also think that in most situations the base's desire to fight fight fight is not realistically reconcilable with the need to win over more voters and save the country from anti-liberalism, that a reduction in the level of political division and hostility would be good for the country generally, and that we'd all be better off if the Democrats' base would come to terms with that.
"The solution is for Chuck Schumer, Brian Schatz, and — yes — Jeanne Shaheen to make the entire Democratic Party into a party that’s not trying to ban fracking. "
Like, why should a Senator from Hawaii be pro-fracking? There's no oil there, people in Hawaii care about the environment more for pretty obvious reasons, and so on. Like, even Florida voters banned offshore billing in a referendum and even after winning massive majorities, DeSantis has made no real moves to repeal that despite the immense control the Florida GOP currnetly has.
Over and over, Matt basically wants a stronger democratic centralism among all Democrats, including non-politicians, that even far stronger parties around the developed world have failed to keep together and gets upset over and over when it doesn't happen.
Yes, part of it is the evil Groups and so on, but the biggest reason you can't have the Democratic Party of say, 2005 again, is many of the people who voted for the Democratic Party in 2005 are actually just more liberal than they were in 2005, more liberal younger people have joined the party, older more conservative Democrats are no longer voters because they're dead, and other former Democrats have moved so far right on various issues there's no good way to get them back.
I'm not against moderation when it needs to happen, but the reality is, people want to be represented by people they trust, agree with, and feel are working toward the goals they want, not chasing after the needs and wants of low-info swing voters in Iowa and Ohio.
A D+25 Congressperson is going to say a lot of things not exactly super popular nationally because there will be a lot of Democrats who are more liberal than 80-90% of voters in that type of district, just like a R+15 Republican will say lots of unpopular things.
Now, I know the pushback to this is, 'well the national party needs to pushback', but again, even in someplace like Iowa, a lot of Democratic voters have the same views as Democrats in California or New York, so you just can't run as a Republican who likes Social Security, some abortions, and the rule of law.
How does that transfer to winning in Ohio? Do you believe democratic voters are incapable of thinking or acting strategically?
I don't want my blue state House Rep and Senators to be very honest and true liberals --- in a minority role. The fact is that the US as a whole is considerably to the right of my opinion. I lived in Ohio for 21 of the last 25 years, I even chaired a State Senate campaign there, and I can assure you the majority of Ohioans are to the right of me, you, and almost every elected dem House and Senate member.
I want my blue elected officials to do everything they can to get people elected in Ohio, because if they don't they can't do a damn thing I want them to do except tell me I'm right. I don't want to be right, I want to get what little change I can get when most of the country doesn't actually agree with me, and probably more importantly, limit damage to people who aren't as privileged as me. I don't think that's a hard concept to grasp or to have explained.
I lived in the political wilderness of 1980 to 1992. That was was worse, for me and the country, than the worst neoliberal policy Bill Clinton championed or signed into law.
It's up to moderates in Ohio, Iowa, and other states to convince progressive and frankly, normie Democratic voters in those states that a Democratic candidates are going to actually listen to their concerns as opposed to just being a free date because they have a D beside their name.
Also, it may help if centrist learned to actually run on ideas that will excite those voters to get them to volunteer, donate, and so on as opposed to a bunch of Republican-lite policies on everything except Social Security and Medicare and maybe abortion depending on the state.
A "1% better than the crazy Republican" may be what centrist strategists think is needed as a Democrat, but its not going to get people to support you beyond maybe showing up on Election Day.
Help me out. Where’s Matt getting the info that the real reason the Surrender Caucus made the deal was to save the filibuster? He seems obsessed with this idea - treating it almost as a known fact - but it just strikes me as the surmise of someone who considers himself too inside to accept the public narrative. Or did I miss where he mentioned his reliable sources?
Anyway, if true, does it matter enough to perseverate over? For my part, I’ve always thought the deal as executed was a great play by the Dems. I was effing thrilled.
I feel like the coherent view is that ending the shutdown after the election was the right decision because continuing it was hurting people with no prospect of extracting concessions. There was some, albeit risky, political rationale for staging the shutdown prior to the elections if it would be helpful to Democrats to be seen to be standing up to Trump on a point of contention where their position is more popular than his, but when the election ended that calculus changed.
You said that you "think it would make sense for progressives to be a bit cold-hearted about this tradeoff for the sake of defeating MAGA", but defeating them at what? The next election is a year away, it's not going to turn on this.
The whole shutdown was unsustainable because the Democrats never aligned on a reason for doing it. Stumbling into a winning hand still doesn't work if you don't know what game you're playing.
What makes you think they didn’t? Your priors about Dems? I feel the sequence of events and the execution ticked a whole lot of boxes that indicate at least some strategic thinking.
Your argument suggests that the Democrats have set themselves up well to force another shutdown in January, because they have now passed full year funding for the parts of the government that care for the vulnerable. So those people won't be available as hostages during a January shutdown. Do you think that second shutdown is likely?
Unpopular opinion, on Slow Boring:
Joe Manchin did not pare down Build Back Better out of “moderation”. That was an excuse.
He pared it down because he sensed Joe Biden was unpopular and didn’t want to be associated with him or his plan.
Notice that Joe Manchin’s rewriting of BBB did not make the Democratic president more “popular”, or make the public see him as “moderate”.
If anything, it made Biden look weak and feckless, even more weak and feckless than the public already saw him as.
This is, of course, irrelevant to the merits of Joe Manchin’s rewrite of BBB (Disclaimer: I consider them modest.)
“Moderation” may be good on the merits. Whether it actually, provably, in deed and not just word, has political rewards, is another matter.
I think the idea that they used "males" instead of "trans women" was a deliberate choice. We don't need to pretend that typing out "trans women" was too onerous for them.
The idea that someone could be so engaged enough to know the impact that trans issues has on politics, but not enough to know that calling trans women males is hurtful goes beyond my level of charity.
I'm not asking for them to be banned, I'm saying they deliberately made their argument less clear to be hurtful and they should be called out for that.
If I'm wrong and they hear this feedback and make efforts to avoid that language again I'll eat crow and say I was too aggressive in reading their intentions. But I bet they won't do that.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read some of the discourse on this. Making Trump look bad is just a clearly bad reason to shut down the government. If Republicans started using government money to take out paid political ads against Democrats, that would rightly be seen as a corrupt misuse of taxpayer dollars. But here the Democrats are wasting billions on a marketing stunt.
My thinking on this is influenced by the fact that I work for a government contractor. Myself and my colleagues worked hard to limit the inefficiency caused by the shutdown, but we weren't able to deliver as much value for the taxpayer money because of the shutdown and things would have gotten a lot worse if it had lasted a few more weeks.
I'm also not persuaded that the expanded ACA subsidies are right on the merits. I would be interested if someone could point me to some cost benefit analysis on that topic. With interest rates high, we need to think carefully about cost-benefits of spending and return ACA spending to Obama levels does not seem like a far-right position to me.
If Matt's argument is that it is worth it to get rid of the filibuster, that's a take that seems at least remotely plausible and would be interested to hear him make that more clearly. But voting against cloture because you don't think you should be allowed to vote against cloture and want to make the harm so apparently that the right is taken away seems like a poor argument to me.
Agree with so much of this post, but my only pushback is portraying senators like Slotkin and Bennett as Dems who have responded to these tradeoffs especially well. Slotkin is the Senator for Michigan, so I think it's fair to assume she voted to reverse California's EV mandate for the benefit of the car companies in her home state. Similarly, did Bennett speak out against capping LNG exports because he's OK taking a short-term loss for the long-term gain of an "all-of-the-above" energy policy? Or because that ban hurts his state's many natural gas producers? Those two examples actually strike me as very similar to Spanberger's shutdown calculus of being unwilling to sacrifice niche interests in your home state to align with broader public opinoin — just on more under-the-radar issues. Ultimately, I like the outcome of both votes so I think it's completely correct to view them as good proof-points, but I would like to see movement on issues where those cross-cutting pressures aren't there before I buy too much of what Slotkin and Bennett are selling on moderation.
When you noted that the alternative to reopening the government was "simply pushing the country into a cascading series of air-traffic-control problems, loss of income for SNAP families, and financial hardship for federal workers," I thought for a moment that you were making the case for reopening. However, you went on to write, "I think the 'push the country into hardship' option made political sense because, as far as we can tell, voters were blaming Trump for the shutdown [a misleading gloss], so hardship would reduce his popularity and reduce his political power." Then you stated, "I was happy to bite that bullet."
Let's recall where the metaphor "bite the bullet" came from and what it therefore means. Years ago, a wounded soldier would be given something (apocryphally a bullet) to bite down on while enduring surgery without anesthesia. So bullet-biting is done by the people in pain, not by those who deem it expedient to be "a bit cold-hearted" and keep the pain coming.
Also, let's go easy on the word "winning" in reference to our (Democrats') position during the shutdown. Being the somewhat less-blamed party (not even the dramatically less-blamed one) is an unimpressive example of winning; and that's if the blame gap doesn't close as the shutdown drags on and people start losing their objectivity. I wouldn't bet on that. I think it's more likely that the Democratic Party's traditional constituency would come to feel betrayed.
Michael Powell, almost alone, bucks the "just when we were winning" outcry in "The Moral Cost of the Democrats' Shutdown Strategy" (The Atlantic, Nov. 11).
A different perspective here from James Fallows. After initial disgust, he now thinks there'll be long-term advantages to the deal. I hope he's right. https://fallows.substack.com/p/why-i-changed-my-mind-about-the-shutdown?utm_campaign=email-post&r=cxkvj&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.
I'm very biased because my spouse and my I are both Federal workers in Northern VA, and especially because my spouse's entire office was about to be laid off if not for the last minute protections Tim Kaine negotiated into the deal. So, Tim Kaine saved my family's livelihood and career prospects, so, selfishly, big thanks, Tim!
But less selfishly: Large scale unilateral (and almost certainly illegal) government layoffs are bad, and stopping them is good, not just for us Feds but also for the country! Who does the weather forecasts? Who does the disaster response? Who provides the economics data? Matt cares about this stuff --- he's written about the importance of good econ data, and about the need for better state capacity. Well, one way to preserve both those things is to stop the unilateral layoffs of career civil servants.
I am very frustrated by the "Dems cached for nothing" line. Maybe it's not a ton, but no federal layoffs is (1) not nothing, and (2) not just a carve out to a specific constituency.
As far as I can tell the soi-disant prohibition against layoffs is a. completely unenforceable, and b. only applies until January anyway, so I would not exactly start taking those resumes down just yet.
The filibuster is what’s broken about the broken system. People repeatedly vote for change that keeps not happening, and the filibuster is why. What little does squeak through is enshittified by the filibuster: by the phase-ins and sunsets required to shoehorn it into the rarer-than-a-lunar-eclipse reconciliation bills that can avoid the filibuster to pass under majority rule.
The minority wants the filibuster to monkey-wrench the majority and the majority tolerates being monkey wrenched for fear of becoming the next minority with no ability to do the same. So we shamble along, broken promise after broken promise, until half the voters don’t even bother, and arguably most of those who still do are only doing so to block the other side from winning anything.
If the Democratic Party rearranged its polices to be more in line nationally with voters' beliefs and concerns, then they might be in danger of achieving electoral victory. Somewhere along the line Democrats forgot that we live in a democracy where you have to actually listen to voters.
If we're assuming, as the article evidently does, that Democrats were never going to get their policy demand, only hurt Trump's approval ratings, then to me it seems desirable that politicians would be responsible enough to prioritize having the government open over scoring political points. But I also think that in most situations the base's desire to fight fight fight is not realistically reconcilable with the need to win over more voters and save the country from anti-liberalism, that a reduction in the level of political division and hostility would be good for the country generally, and that we'd all be better off if the Democrats' base would come to terms with that.
"The solution is for Chuck Schumer, Brian Schatz, and — yes — Jeanne Shaheen to make the entire Democratic Party into a party that’s not trying to ban fracking. "
Like, why should a Senator from Hawaii be pro-fracking? There's no oil there, people in Hawaii care about the environment more for pretty obvious reasons, and so on. Like, even Florida voters banned offshore billing in a referendum and even after winning massive majorities, DeSantis has made no real moves to repeal that despite the immense control the Florida GOP currnetly has.
Over and over, Matt basically wants a stronger democratic centralism among all Democrats, including non-politicians, that even far stronger parties around the developed world have failed to keep together and gets upset over and over when it doesn't happen.
Yes, part of it is the evil Groups and so on, but the biggest reason you can't have the Democratic Party of say, 2005 again, is many of the people who voted for the Democratic Party in 2005 are actually just more liberal than they were in 2005, more liberal younger people have joined the party, older more conservative Democrats are no longer voters because they're dead, and other former Democrats have moved so far right on various issues there's no good way to get them back.
I'm not against moderation when it needs to happen, but the reality is, people want to be represented by people they trust, agree with, and feel are working toward the goals they want, not chasing after the needs and wants of low-info swing voters in Iowa and Ohio.
A D+25 Congressperson is going to say a lot of things not exactly super popular nationally because there will be a lot of Democrats who are more liberal than 80-90% of voters in that type of district, just like a R+15 Republican will say lots of unpopular things.
Now, I know the pushback to this is, 'well the national party needs to pushback', but again, even in someplace like Iowa, a lot of Democratic voters have the same views as Democrats in California or New York, so you just can't run as a Republican who likes Social Security, some abortions, and the rule of law.
How does that transfer to winning in Ohio? Do you believe democratic voters are incapable of thinking or acting strategically?
I don't want my blue state House Rep and Senators to be very honest and true liberals --- in a minority role. The fact is that the US as a whole is considerably to the right of my opinion. I lived in Ohio for 21 of the last 25 years, I even chaired a State Senate campaign there, and I can assure you the majority of Ohioans are to the right of me, you, and almost every elected dem House and Senate member.
I want my blue elected officials to do everything they can to get people elected in Ohio, because if they don't they can't do a damn thing I want them to do except tell me I'm right. I don't want to be right, I want to get what little change I can get when most of the country doesn't actually agree with me, and probably more importantly, limit damage to people who aren't as privileged as me. I don't think that's a hard concept to grasp or to have explained.
I lived in the political wilderness of 1980 to 1992. That was was worse, for me and the country, than the worst neoliberal policy Bill Clinton championed or signed into law.
It's up to moderates in Ohio, Iowa, and other states to convince progressive and frankly, normie Democratic voters in those states that a Democratic candidates are going to actually listen to their concerns as opposed to just being a free date because they have a D beside their name.
Also, it may help if centrist learned to actually run on ideas that will excite those voters to get them to volunteer, donate, and so on as opposed to a bunch of Republican-lite policies on everything except Social Security and Medicare and maybe abortion depending on the state.
A "1% better than the crazy Republican" may be what centrist strategists think is needed as a Democrat, but its not going to get people to support you beyond maybe showing up on Election Day.
Help me out. Where’s Matt getting the info that the real reason the Surrender Caucus made the deal was to save the filibuster? He seems obsessed with this idea - treating it almost as a known fact - but it just strikes me as the surmise of someone who considers himself too inside to accept the public narrative. Or did I miss where he mentioned his reliable sources?
Anyway, if true, does it matter enough to perseverate over? For my part, I’ve always thought the deal as executed was a great play by the Dems. I was effing thrilled.
I thought Politico had reported on their filibuster fears pretty extensively.
Thanks. I don’t read politico, so, there it is.
I feel like the coherent view is that ending the shutdown after the election was the right decision because continuing it was hurting people with no prospect of extracting concessions. There was some, albeit risky, political rationale for staging the shutdown prior to the elections if it would be helpful to Democrats to be seen to be standing up to Trump on a point of contention where their position is more popular than his, but when the election ended that calculus changed.
You said that you "think it would make sense for progressives to be a bit cold-hearted about this tradeoff for the sake of defeating MAGA", but defeating them at what? The next election is a year away, it's not going to turn on this.
Informative. Better than a rant.
The whole shutdown was unsustainable because the Democrats never aligned on a reason for doing it. Stumbling into a winning hand still doesn't work if you don't know what game you're playing.
What makes you think they didn’t? Your priors about Dems? I feel the sequence of events and the execution ticked a whole lot of boxes that indicate at least some strategic thinking.
Your argument suggests that the Democrats have set themselves up well to force another shutdown in January, because they have now passed full year funding for the parts of the government that care for the vulnerable. So those people won't be available as hostages during a January shutdown. Do you think that second shutdown is likely?