The “Schumer Shutdown” is here and Democrats have essentially reversed thirty years of messaging about the dangers of closing the government.
Forty-three Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Shumer, D-N.Y., voted against a stopgap budget measure Tuesday night that triggered a government shutdown. This came over protests by congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump.
It’s a remarkable reversal for America’s two major political parties.
In past shutdown debates, Republicans have typically been in the more difficult position of demanding budget cuts while Democrats blast them for not supporting X, Y, and Z. In many cases there has been a Democrat in the White House who could help congressional Democrats craft any narrative they chose about the catastrophic consequence of the government closing.
They’ve typically portrayed the ensuing government shutdowns as something akin to the apocalypse.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., posted a montage of Democrats arguing during past budget battles saying that shutting down the government would be devastating to the average American.
“We are not willing to pay $2.5 billion or $5 billion and wasting taxpayer dollars on a ransom note because Donald Trump decided that he was going to shut down the government and hold the American people hostage,” then-incoming House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said in 2018.
“Stop trying to negotiate. Open the government. Then we’ll talk about whatever you want to talk about,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., one of the most prominent and vocal backers of the current shutdown, said in 2018, according to the New York Post.
This sort of messaging goes back even further for Democrats, who’ve used the potential for government shutdown to excoriate Republicans about “gamesmanship” for decades.
President Bill Clinton was able to turn the government shutdown message in his party’s favor in 1995. Clinton, who of course had a supportive media environment to aid him, went with the consistent message that Republicans were holding the government “hostage” while he was trying to save Medicare. The plan worked.
During what turned out to be the longest government shutdown in American history up to that point, the public soured somewhat on Republicans, who had made historic congressional gains in the 1994 midterm elections under the leadership of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Clinton was able to stem that tide with his success in the shutdown fight, though he later declared in his 1996 State of the Union Address that the “era of big government is over.”
So, the ultimate impact was mixed, but the consensus in Washington became that Democrats won the messaging battle and Clinton continued to be popular with the American public.
President Barack Obama, who had an even more favorable media environment than Clinton, pinned the blame for the 2013 government shutdown on Republicans who merely had “disagreements” over health care policy. His strategy was to create the illusion that he was a practical moderate while his opponents were wild-eyed extremists.
Like Clinton, Obama went with the narrative that Republicans were trying to take away health care from Americans and were holding the country hostage to do it. He rather absurdly chimed in during the current budget fight to make the same claim.
As Fox News commentator Guy Benson pointed out though, Obama argued in 2013 that shutting down the government over differences in health care policy was just beyond the pale. He said that Republicans shouldn’t hold the whole country “hostage” over “ideological demands.”
Ah, maybe what he meant is that Republicans can’t shut down the government over ideological differences, but when Democrats do it that’s all good and well.
In the past, Democrats have tried to portray themselves as the guardians of the average American, looking out for the little guy and all that. This time they aren’t doing such a good job of making that case, since some of the health care benefits they are protecting is, in part, for noncitizens.
While the media and some Democrats have denied that they are protecting benefits for illegal aliens, Vice President JD Vance explained how two programs from President Joe Biden’s tenure gave federal benefits to illegal aliens. Vance said that in the beginning of their negotiations Democrats demanded these benefits be turned back on.
Democrats and their allies in the media continue to deny this accusation, but as my colleague Tony Kinnett pointed out, some states controlled by Democrats have previously been clear that the programs were being used by illegal aliens.
Schumer used to be against giving benefits to illegal aliens, but much has changed since the 1990s it seems.
“All over where we go, people say, ‘Well, can’t you stop illegal immigrants or others from coming here?’ And the number one answer we give our constituents is, when they come here, they can get jobs, get benefits against the law because of fraud,” Schumer, who was at the time a congressman, said in a speech in 1996.
So, Democrats are in a real pickle now. They don’t have a clear message about why they’ve chosen to go nuclear in this government funding fight besides the old “health care” throwback that has a lot of holes this time around.
Democrats weren’t playing chicken with catastrophe. Instead, they were rushing blindly into a wall of their own making. The Democratic Party base is looking for confrontation and blood. They want their party leaders to oppose literally anything Trump and Republicans in Congress are a part of, regardless of what it means for the country. So here we are.
By going into shutdown they’ve essentially handed Republicans a perfect opportunity to conduct DOGE 2.0. Now, it’s Democrats who are holding the country “hostage” and every day that goes by another group of bureaucrats will be fired. Quite a genius strategy from the party of big government.
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