Playing a bad hand badly
Schumer's submission was months in the making.
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As German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck famously said, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.” But as Bismarck also recognized, effective politicians define what is possible thorough their actions and strategies.
At this linchpin moment in the history of the United States — with our democratic institutions and the rule of law under attack by an authoritarian in the White House — some leaders of the Democratic Party, the sole institutional opposition to the fascist assault, are falling down on the job. Their fundamental problem — evident from the catastrophic surrender by nine Senate Democrats to the GOP’s DOGE continuing resolution (CR) bill last week — is a lack of strategy.
Much of the discussion since Trump took office has been about the failure of Democrats in DC to yell loud enough and “break norms” of courtesy and decorum. But a lack of rudeness or ability to snark is not the fundamental problem here.
There are plenty of Democrats good at formulating creative insults and getting wide attention for making them. What has been missing for months in DC, however, is a unified Democratic strategy for publicly defining, and relentlessly opposing, the MAGA GOP’s battery of the nation and its most cherished institutions. And the absence of a strategy is all the more glaring given that the public’s tolerance for Trump’s course of illegal conduct is lessening by the day.
A bad hand
Certainly, Democrats find themselves in a tough spot as a result of last November’s elections, being in the minority in both houses of Congress, as well as losing the White House. But nonetheless, they have played their hand disastrously.
It was clear for months that the March 14 expiration of the continuing resolution that passed in December of last year was going to be the first big opportunity of 2025 — and potentially the last — for Democrats to use the legislative process to push back against the Trump assault. This was because a new CR had to pass to avoid a shutdown, and it would have to do so through a narrowly GOP controlled House and avoid a filibuster in the Senate (where the GOP holds only 53 seats), which requires a vote of 60 senators.
In recent weeks, the stakes for the March CR vote increased as the Trump administration’s illegal attacks on the government, the rule of law and the constitutional authority of the Congress became ever more audacious. These events made it all the more clear that Democrats had no choice but to try to score a win with their bad hand of cards.
Meanwhile, thanks to effective pushback from Democrats and others, Trump’s position was weakening. Most importantly, state and local leaders drew attention to Trump’s often nihilistic attacks on the rule of law and essential government services. And state attorneys general — working hand in glove with networks of legal advocacy groups — implemented litigation plans they had been developing and perfecting, in some cases for years, to challenge Trump’s illegal actions in courts throughout the country.
What has made this litigation effort so effective has been the extraordinary level of coordination, expertise, and strategic thinking that has gone into it. In many cases, illegal actions, like the mass firing of federal probationary workers, have been challenged in multiple venues (sometimes including both courts and administrative bodies) at the same time. This both increases the chances of success and the attention being paid across the country to the recklessness of the Trump administration’s use of their power to tear down American institutions. The result has been to place on the defensive not only Trump, but also the GOP elected leaders who have rendered themselves and their party into mere appendages. As a result, the court proceedings have played a key role in demonstrating that Republicans’ allegiance is to Trump and Musk, not the American people.
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As the administration has become more openly antagonistic to the nation it’s charged with governing — as demonstrated, for example, by the mass firings of veterans, threats to Social Security benefits, and a House Republican budget resolution that will require gutting Medicaid — Trumpers are now placing themselves at direct odds with huge numbers of citizens, among them many of the the independent voters that decide elections.
While anger toward the Trumpers’ nihilism was growing, the March 14 deadline approached. The opposition outside DC reasonably assumed that Democratic leaders in the Senate and House had a coordinated plan in place to meet the moment, and to leverage the success opponents of Trumpism had in bringing public attention to the stakes facing the country.
They were wrong.
The seeds of failure
In attempting to explain away their surrender of last Friday, Schumer and some of his fellow Democratic senators have unintentionally confessed to their political malpractice — they viewed the March deadline entirely through the lens of budget battles as they have been fought in DC since the 1990s.
The surrendering Democrats based their game plan on the assumption that Republicans would not be able to pass a continuing resolution in the House without Democratic votes. It made sense if one operated with the assumption that history always repeats itself. The GOP has a minuscule House majority, and a number of purportedly “Freedom Caucus” Republicans have virtually never voted for a CR, especially if doesn’t massively cut the deficit.
Yet there were a number of warnings signs that such a principle was not worth much. The far right’s “commitment” to fiscal austerity long ago became nothing more than a pretense. And just days ago, almost every House Republican, including virtually the entire Freedom Caucus, voted for a profligate budget resolution that calls for increasing the debt limit and massive tax cuts while at the same time promising to impose huge cuts on the neediest and most vulnerable Americans.
As the budget resolution vote made all the more clear, loyalty to Trump — who now fully controls the GOP — is all that matters to elected Republicans. That development alone provided good reason for Democrats to question the assumption that their votes would be required to pass a CR in the House. Furthermore, Democrats in both the House and the Senate must have noticed the conspicuous absence of any effort by GOP leaders to open negotiations with them over the terms of a CR even as the days ticked down toward March 14. In sum, relying on the assumption that the usual rules would apply was foolhardy.
But the surrendering Democrats’ problems went far beyond that. Their key failure was a lack of strategy. There was no indication that Democrats in the two houses of Congress had unified around a goal they hoped to achieve as a result of the CR fight. That is, frankly, both stupefying and unforgivable.
The issue presented was clear: The rapid Trumpist dismantling of government is not only cruel and nihilistic, it’s also illegal and a direct attack on the constitutionally assigned authority of Congress. Trump was, and is, selectively gutting, and even shutting down, parts of the government that he (or Musk) dislikes, in direct defiance of the legislative prerogatives of Congress that established and funded the agencies he’s destroying.
At a minimum, Democrats should have set out to use the CR process — which was their one near-term opportunity to deploy the filibuster — to demand, and insist, on guardrails that would place a stop to Trump’s illegal course of conduct. Those bottom line demands should have been agreed upon and become part of a carefully planned campaign well before the March 14 deadline.
Some members of Congress – together with commentators including, for example, Brian Beutler — had been saying as much for weeks and offering up specific ideas, such as a short-term CR packaged together with mandates for ending the DOGE assault, that had to be satisfied for Democrats to vote for longer future funding periods. These proposals made legislative and political sense, because they offered a path by which Democrats could make clear that they were not seeking to shut down the government, as the GOP (including Trump himself) has done in the past, but rather were trying to prevent the ongoing lawless MAGA rampage. Furthermore, polling demonstrated that the public was likely to (properly) largely blame Trump and his captive party, not the Democrats, for any resulting shutdown.
Had Democrats offered up such a bill and presented a unified front in support of it ahead of March 14, Democratic senators would not simply have been in the position of deciding whether or not to vote in favor of a shutdown. Instead, they would have been able to wrong-foot their GOP colleagues about their support for a DOGE “dismantle government services bill” rather than their alternative “keep essential services intact” proposal.
The popularity of such a Democratic alternative would likely only have grown as the public dissatisfaction grew with Trump’s atrocious “management” of the government and his administration’s increasingly overt threats to, among other things, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and veterans’ benefits. But no such proposal was presented.
The lessons of self-defeat
Having failed to develop a legislative plan to oppose the Trump coup scheme, Democrats rendered themselves into sitting ducks. They lost this crucial battle before Schumer announced his intention to not block the House Republican CR.
Trump, Musk, and Mike Johnson are atrocious legislative strategists. During his first term, Trump managed to be the first president to engineer a government shutdown. And last December, before Trump had even entered the White House, he and Musk almost bumbled into causing, and being blamed for, a government shutdown for no particular reason.
Yet even these legislative incompetents had little difficulty realizing that, by choosing a path of passivity, Democrats had left themselves open to a devastating defeat.
And MAGA leaders took their opportunity, using the complete political dependence of virtually every Republican legislator in the House on Trump as a lever to extract votes for a GOP-only CR. Johnson sweetened the pot for some of his members by including in the bill a gutting of the budget of Washington DC and an assault on programs for the needy. He also sold it as a mechanism to give Musk and OMB Director Russell Vought a clear runway for the next six month to complete their scheme to dismantle the federal government.
That was all it took to pass the CR on the same party-line vote that had just passed the budget resolution. Then Johnson called the House to a recess and dared Democrats to filibuster the House CR. While Johnson might not be particularly savvy, he calculated that Senate Democrats would ultimately surrender — and he was right.
Having chosen, over the previous weeks and months, not to take elemental political steps to prepare for the eventuality he and his colleagues were presented with last Friday, Schumer’s contention that Democrats were faced with no good options had a curious ring of truth. They left themselves with no good options, then justified their surrender on the ground that there were no good options.
In announcing the Democratic cave, Schumer emphasized the parade of horribles that would ensue if the government shut down. He asserted that a shutdown would have given Trump and his cronies license to do great damage to the government.
Schumer’s argument was both somewhat true, but also absurd. On one hand, it’s all but certain that Trump would have tried to leverage a shutdown to further his nefarious ends. But on the other, as the past two months have made clear, Trump does not need a shutdown to destroy the country. Put otherwise, Schumer and his colleagues voted to give Trump license to do just what Schumer was warning against.
So where do we go from here? One terrible option is for the Democratic Party to descend into an orgy of infighting. While this may be a tempting course of action for some, such division is just what Russia and Trumpers benefit from (as we saw most dramatically during the 2016 campaign) and use every tool at their disposal to foment.
In this dire moment for the nation and its democratic institutions, the most significant cleavage in the Democratic Party is not ideological but strategic. One cohort of the party is willing — despite the emergency presented — to continue forward in a reactive mode, biding their time with the expectation that Trump’s authoritarian project will peter out on its own. But the larger faction of the party understands, or is beginning to understand, that watchful waiting is neither a cogent nor responsible approach. This is not an argument for “breaking norms” as an end in itself. But it is an argument for taking chances based on rational strategies.
The surrender of March 14 should serve as a model of what not to do. While a key opportunity was needlessly lost, Democrats have a responsibility to the nation to avoid indulgent finger-pointing. They need to seize new the opportunities that will inevitably arise as Trump’s project to tear the United States continues, and to do so in a coordinated and strategic way. Reactive meekness must be a thing of the past.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Cuck Schumer made the same calculation the Vichy regime did: minimize damage rather than resist. I say we resist.
This is a painful read as the truth often is. But pointing out what happened and placing blame on those who screwed up is not finger pointing. It is a necessary exercise that enables you to regroup and move forward having acknowledged that you fucked up and that you need to change your strategy and possibly your leader(s). Pushing back against ineffective and worse, detrimental, leadership is needed now to break the democrats doom loop of insanity. You can't seize opportunities if your MO is letting them pass. You need to change your MO.