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As we move through the second week of the government shutdown, it’s become clear that Democrats are winning the messaging war and it’s not particularly close.
A New York Times/Sienna poll taken shortly before the shutdown found that 26 percent of voters blamed Trump and Republicans, while only 19 percent blamed Democrats. A Marist poll conducted at about the same time found an even bigger gap; Republicans were to blame 38 to 27 percent. And the Washington Post, which polled voters shortly after the shutdown began, found that 30 percent blamed Democrats, while 47 percent blamed Republicans.
While a CBS poll published yesterday painted a more mixed picture, the numbers so far have been largely heartening for Democrats. They suggest the electorate has come to realize that the Republicans cannot be trusted to govern responsibly.
There’s another reason Dems should stand strong: Republicans have shown they don’t negotiate in good faith or follow through on their commitments. They’ve used their majorities in Congress to branch to tear up bipartisan agreements, cancel appropriated funds, and attempt to turn Trump into a king.
If Republicans are fully on board with Trump’s efforts to seize funds like a dictator, there’s not much point in negotiating with them. You might as well force them to own their priorities, including massively increasing healthcare premiums, and then use it against them on the campaign trail next year.
MAGA’s terrible messaging
The current Republican faceplant was not by any means a foregone conclusion.
Democrats initially moved towards the shutdown with a great deal of trepidation. Back in March, Senate Democrats were so afraid that the shutdown argument would go against them that their caucus removed its own spine. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats in leadership broke their own filibuster, handing the GOP an easy victory and enraging their own base.
That rage had a salutary effect, and Democrats were better prepared this time. Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries settled on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies as their key demand, capitalizing on the traditional Democratic advantage on healthcare issues. They’ve also called for a restoration of some Medicaid funding, which would help to protect small hospitals — disproportionately located in Trump-friendly rural areas.
Jeffries, Schumer, and other Democrats have been single-mindedly focusing their messaging on healthcare — sometimes so single-mindedly that they’ve seemed reluctant to respond to Trump’s other attacks on the Constitution.
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But the fact of the matter is that healthcare is a strong topic for Democrats. A YouGov poll earlier this year found them with a whopping 43 to 26 percent advantage over Republicans on the issue, and that’s only going to get worse for the GOP. Thanks to Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” ACA premiums are likely to rise 75 percent for the average purchaser next year.
Republicans are barely pretending to care. Mike Johnson, for example, brushed off questions about rising premiums yesterday with a whopper about how “Republicans are the party working around the clock every day to fix healthcare.”
Even so, many analysts thought Democrats would have a difficult time breaking through to voters. Republicans, after all, were asking for funding levels to be extended; Democrats were demanding changes. As former appropriations staffer Matt Glassman argued at Politico, Republicans “can expect to win the public opinion battle during the shutdown if they stick to a simple message of reopening the government and resuming the bargaining.”
Republicans have not, however, stuck to that simple message.
Trump has posted AI memes boasting about mass firing federal workers if Democrats prolong the shutdown. He’s said that his vanity White House ballroom project will go ahead even as federal workers are furloughed. Johnson appears to be using the shutdown as an excuse to delay seating Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, whose vote could force the House to demand the release of the Epstein files.
To the extent Republicans have managed to settle on a single talking point, it’s that Democrats want taxpayer dollars to pay for healthcare for undocumented people — a lie so egregious that even the mainstream media is balking at repeating it.
All of this is deeply unserious. It’s chaotic and almost self-parodic messaging, and polling suggests it’s not working .
Trump may not be able or willing to understand the numbers quantifying his failure. But vulnerable Republican House members in purple districts who have to explain why they’re voting yet again to gut Medicare may not be so sanguine.
Bad faith has consequences
Republicans are lighting themselves on fire, but past experience suggests Democrats might still be tempted to try to throw water on them.
Red and purple state senators are often terrified of alienating Trump voters. In the Senate, Angus King of Maine (technically an independent, though he caucuses with Democrats), Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania already crossed party lines to vote with Republicans to reopen the government.
Since contrarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul voted with Democrats, that means that currently the vote is 55-45, and five more Democratic votes are needed to break the filibuster. As the shutdown grinds on, it may get harder and harder for Schumer to hold his caucus together. Wavering senators, though, should remember that working with Republicans always leads to misery, because Republicans are bad faith trolls and fascists.
Trump has made clear since the beginning of his administration that he thinks he should have unilateral power to void spending already passed by Congress. More, the craven Supreme Court has decided that just for Trump, as a treat, it’s going to take away Congress’s power of the purse. Last month SCOTUS okayed Trump’s flagrantly unconstitutional move to withhold $4 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress — cuts which could lead to 14 million deaths globally.
Trump is also using the shutdown to freeze and cancel funds with dubious constitutional rationale. OMB Director Ross Vought announced he’s cutting billions for green energy projects, specifically targeting especially states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. He also slashed $2.1 billion in Chicago infrastructure funding. The administration is seizing Congress’s spending power and using it as an partisan cudgel, harming the environment and the populace of states and cities who dare to elect Democrats.
Republicans haven’t been satisfied with presidential impoundment, though. They’ve also used a grubby little maneuver called rescission. Since the 1970s, presidents have had a rarely-used power to ask Congress to reconsider, and rescind, already-passed spending. This requires a simple majority vote and so cannot be filibustered. Using this tactic, Republicans earlier this year defunded public broadcasting mere months after they’d funded it. North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis admitted that Republicans “betrayed a prior agreement and a prior appropriation.”
As Sen. Chris Murphy has argued, Trump “doesn’t give a fuck what we write” into spending legislation since he just intends to impound money and demand rescissions anyway. Given that, Murphy says, “every time that we go along with these appropriations bills, we’re putting a bipartisan veneer of endorsement on an illegal process that’s ultimately part of his campaign to destroy our democracy.”
MSNBC reported that other Senate Democrats who voted for the bipartisan spending bill in March were soured on the process thanks to rescissions. And Jeffries himself acknowledged that “we’ve got to make sure there are enforceability mechanisms to ensure that the agreement was actually kept and that the Trump administration follows the rules.”
Democrats can’t win — which also means they can’t really lose. Either Republicans restore healthcare funding in a way that blocks rescissions and impoundment, or they refuse, overturn the filibuster by themselves, and see how their vulnerable members fare running on cutting Medicare and destroying rural hospitals not once, but twice.
The only way Democrats can make things worse for themselves or for the country at this point is by caving. Hopefully, as the GOP’s bad political position sinks in, they will have less temptation to do that.
That’s it for today
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I am grimly comfortable that the Republicans will, indeed probably have, cut their political throat. But oh boy what a lot of people will needlessly suffer because they were given power.
In the end, how many of the American people will pay the price for this battle taking place in Washington? I just watched a video that addresses the topic which Mike “Despicable “ Johnson is so good at lying about- the statement that the Democrats want to give Medicaid to undocumented individuals. He spews his rhetoric while knowing that it isn’t true- so Christian of him!