Twenty-two days into the federal government shutdown, the White House and its allies circulated these words by House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) far and wide. “Shutdowns are terrible,” she told a reporter. “Of course, there will be families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility very seriously. But it is one of the few leverage times we have.”
It was a succinct statement of the Democratic position on the shutdown. The party does not control the White House, House, or Senate. But Democrats do retain the power to filibuster legislation in the upper chamber. Later that day, 44 of the 47 senators who caucus with the Democrats voted for the 12th time to block a clean continuing resolution that would temporarily fund federal operations and permit the government to reopen. That is indeed the leverage point that the Democratic minority still has.
Democrats flirted with abolishing the filibuster while they still had control of the Senate under former President Joe Biden. Progressive Democrats said it was a moral imperative and a matter of racial justice despite employing this legislative procedure against Republican majorities for years. Some Democrats, eager to expand government, are practically baiting Republicans into scrapping or diluting the filibuster now, with an eye toward what they would be able to accomplish without the 60-vote threshold to end debate if they prevail in next year’s midterm elections.
That is nothing new. What is a more recent development is that a supermajority of Democrats has embraced the strategy of shutting down the federal government to force a Republican president and GOP congressional majorities to give them what they want. It is something that most Democrats, including the party’s last three presidents, have repeatedly rejected as politically, fiscally, and morally illegitimate. Now the progressive Democrats who aggrandize government and fervently believe in its power to achieve social justice want to keep the government shut down indefinitely, and what’s left of the Democratic establishment is largely going along with them.
That’s not necessarily how Democratic leaders want voters to see the shutdown, which is why Republicans found Clark’s comments so revealing. The minority party hopes that voters will not understand the process or procedure and simply note that Republicans are in charge of everything — the “trifecta,” as political reporters like to call it — and expect them to fix it. They want President Donald Trump and the GOP congressional leadership to lose the blame game and be held responsible for the political dysfunction as voters get ready to head to the polls in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City — and next year, all across the country.
While government shutdowns have been triggered by Republican congressional leaders in the past, such as the showdowns between then-President Bill Clinton and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich during the early days of the first Republican-controlled House in 40 years, they have far more often been the playbook of a conservative rump of lawmakers. Even the 21-day 1995-96 shutdown eventually produced a rift between Gingrich and Bob Dole, who was the Senate majority leader and would go on to be the unsuccessful Republican presidential nominee against Clinton.
During the famous Obamacare shutdown of 2013, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) played the role Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and others are playing now, though it should be noted that the Republicans at least controlled the House at that time. Fiscal hawks in the House have pressed GOP leaders to hold firm in various legislative stalemates, in hopes of extracting spending cuts from recalcitrant Democrats. The Obamacare shutdown presupposed that then-President Barack Obama could be prevailed upon to sign into law the defunding of his biggest legislative victory.
It’s a history that may predispose voters with long memories to blame Republicans for shutdowns regardless of the circumstances, as some in the press are wont to do. But this method of doing business fell into disfavor, although at great political cost to those who sought to lead House Republicans. Both John Boehner and Paul Ryan saw their speakerships brought to a premature end more or less because of clashes with the Freedom Caucus. A smaller group of rebels forced out Kevin McCarthy and threatened to do the same to current House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).
Yet despite a period of divided government with a Republican-led House and an enfeebled Biden clinging to the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, there wasn’t a shutdown in the previous administration. A government shutdown, Johnson told the Washington Examiner last year, “never works in favor of the party that brings it about.”
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) concurred at the time, “Some of our members do want to use a government shutdown to force things. I am not in that camp. I don’t think that ever works.”
Democrats are now willing to test that theory. It isn’t exactly unprecedented. During Trump’s first term, they picked two shutdown fights over immigration policy. The first, over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a congressionally unsanctioned Obama-era program shielding from deportation some young illegal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors, lasted just two days. Even though DACA often polls well, red-state Democrats seeking reelection to the Senate did not want to shut down the government in pursuit of amnesty for even a relatively sympathetic subset of illegal immigrants early in an election year.
The second, an attempt to block funding for Trump’s border wall, was the longest shutdown on record at 35 days. It began in the aftermath of the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats experienced something of a blue wave and gained 40 House seats to flip the chamber, and carried into when they took over. Trump also made comments appearing to accept blame for the shutdown. (There was a nine-hour lapse of government funding earlier in 2018 between these two Democrat-provoked shutdowns.)
This was the frame of mind many progressive Democrats were in in March, when a government shutdown once again beckoned. It was an opportunity for Resistance, a chance to show the beaten-down left-wing base that their party knew how to fight after a series of dispiriting election losses across the country (not least being Trump’s return to the White House). But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) ensured the votes were there to keep the government open — and the base roared.
Schumer was not about to make that mistake again this month. Neither does the Trump White House miss any opportunity to label the impasse “the Schumer shutdown.” It is alliterative and, as political slogans go, true.
At this writing, neither side is budging. The polls paint a somewhat ambiguous picture of who is being blamed for the shutdown, and while few approve of the seeming chaos, nobody is being absolutely clobbered yet. Unlike in late 2018, Trump’s approval ratings have mostly held steady in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The 2026 midterm elections are still more than a year away. But Democrats sense Republicans are vulnerable on healthcare and are trying to make the shutdown about Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire later this year for unrelated procedural reasons of their own making (Democrats used the reconciliation process to enact them, obviating the need for bipartisan support but ensuring they would lapse).
Whatever happens, Democrats have embraced a new mentality that sits uneasily alongside their professed concern for Trump’s (dis)regard for long-standing norms. It made a certain amount of intrinsic sense that skeptics of big government, in an effort to extract spending cuts and impose elusive fiscal discipline, would think the country could weather a government shutdown until they got what they wanted. But people who profess to believe that any momentary interruption of a meaningful government service or benefit will result in the deaths of untold millions?
This brings to mind one of the reasons Johnson was reluctant to have a shutdown fight with Biden. “The president holds all the cards for how painful a shutdown can be,” he said in 2024. “With Joe Biden being underwater as he is, being under 38% approval, he would have made it extremely painful immediately for the American people.”
Trump has tried to flex similar muscles since the government shut down, targeting Democratic priorities as he urges Senate Democrats to approve a short-term funding bill. But this appears to have only emboldened Democrats further. It remains to be seen which competing Democratic impulse wins out: If compelled to choose, are they the party of government or the party of Resistance? Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is set to explore ways to heighten the contradictions, with hard votes on specific issues.
THUNE TEASES SHUTDOWN VOTES TO PAY TROOPS AND AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS
Republicans have plenty of at-risk members in next year’s midterm elections and fragile congressional majorities. Democrats see faultlines there that could be similarly ripe for exploitation. There isn’t an obvious exit ramp, and it is not clear whether there is a Democratic leader strong enough to take it.
Activists in both parties believe their own ineffectual leaders meekly follow the rules while their ruthless opponents trample them with reckless abandon. Trump was, to some extent, at least a temporary solution to this problem for Republicans. Some rank-and-file Democrats would like to see one of their own decide to burn it all down and see what happens.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
