Trump’s second term is broadly defined by his monomaniacal desire to either end or fatally impair the federal government. With the help of Elon Musk and Russell Vought, the Trump administration managed to do this in the most alienating possible way. As my colleague Alex Shephard noted this week, the administration’s slash-and-burn speedrun through the civil service has been broadly unpopular. It also probably goes a long way toward making any of the GOP’s rhetoric about Democrats being to blame for this most recent shutdown harder to take seriously.
But the reason things have dragged to a legislative standstill in October is essentially because Republicans in Congress willed it to be so when they returned to Washington to rejoin Trump as devoted supplicants. Their most fateful decision in that regard? Giving up one of the legislative branch’s core functions—the power of the purse. As NPR reported, by the first week of February, Republican lawmakers had already begun to master the art of explaining away why they were happy to surrender the power to appropriate money to Trump.
I characterized this at the time as an escalation in GOP lawmakers’ expansive campaign of self-abnegation. But it has ended up being so much more. The decision to give the White House full power to decide what, when, and how congressionally appropriated money is spent has created an impasse more deep and intractable than the shutdown itself, because the question of how the conflict over Obamacare subsidies gets resolved has become impossible to answer.
Let’s think about it for a minute. The White House’s position, as advanced by Vice President JD Vance and others, is that Senate Democrats should stop filibustering the appropriations bill now, and the matter of the subsidies can be negotiated later. The problem is that it’s impossible for a reasonable person to view that offer as sincere. Sure, Congress can go through the motions: meet in committee, hash out a deal, pass a bill, and send it to Trump’s desk. Trump can even sign that bill. But none of it matters when you know that Trump is likely to simply appropriate or not appropriate that money as he sees fit through pocket rescissions.
What we have here is a fully busted appropriations process; it is impossible to have faith in anything that Trump and his Republican cronies do with taxpayer dollars, even in instances in which bills have been negotiated, agreed to, and passed. And Republicans just keep on tipping their hands that they don’t really care about restoring that faith. This week, the chief way they responded to Democrats’ demands was to threaten federal workers’ back pay, despite the law being very clear that workers are entitled to those wages once the shutdown ends. Here, Democrats should say, "If the Trump administration is willing to break faith, and the law, to not pay you now, there is no reason to believe your steady paycheck is safe under any circumstances."
So when and how does this get resolved? Knowing of the Trump administration’s faithlessness and the physiological impossibility of him honoring any deal made on Obamacare subsidies—or anything else—it’s not clear that Democrats should even play a role in resolving the matter. As Garrett Graff wrote, "If appropriations bills are not seen as enforceable contracts, why should any Member of Congress vote to fund any part of the federal government under Donald Trump? You’re voting to provide money for lawlessness." Having once opted to give Trump’s paramilitary forces the money to invade American cities, Democrats should not position themselves to be fooled a second time.
It’s worth pointing out that Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress, so they can end the impasse any time they want, all on their own. I’ll admit that I do not know what Devil Magic has heretofore kept the GOP from simply nuking the filibuster and getting on with this. Perhaps they desire even the slightest whiff of bipartisan assent for Trump’s designs because of the cover it earns them from the mainstream political media, who are as desperate as ever to find the smallest scintilla of evidence that the American experiment is still working. But from here, the shutdown calculus becomes simple: If Democratic votes are what Trump and his GOP enablers need the most, they must never be provided.
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