The editorial board of The Washington Post is warning that progressive Democrats are leading the party into a “shutdown trap.”
In an op-ed published Wednesday morning, the board noted that Democrats “shut off any potential escape valve to avoid a shutdown” when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), facing a left-wing revolt, apparently backed off a potential plan to buy more time for negotiations.
“In doing so, progressives embraced the same disastrous mentality that led the House Freedom Caucus to believe it could come out ahead in previous government funding standoffs: They wrongly assumed their political leverage would withstand the ensuing fallout,” the board wrote.
The federal government formally went into a shutdown at midnight after congressional leaders were unable to reach a deal on a stopgap spending bill. Two Democratic senators and one independent voted for the Republican stopgap spending bill Tuesday evening.
But the large majority of Democrats in the House and Senate are demanding that Republicans agree to repeal Medicaid cuts and extend ObamaCare subsidies in exchange for their votes to reopen the government.
The Post’s editorial board said Republicans shared blame for the shutdown by refusing to negotiate with Democrats and criticized President Trump’s “provocative social media jabs” targeting House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
“Nevertheless, the public has proved to be unsupportive of lawmakers who create unnecessary crises to extract political concessions,” it wrote. “Democrats who quietly favor a shutdown dismiss this as trite conventional wisdom. Republicans haven’t been afraid of hardball politics, and they have seemingly suffered no meaningful consequences for it. So why not play their own game, especially when Democratic voters are eager to see elected officials stand up to Trump?”
“The answer is simple: The Freedom Caucus’s tactics have failed to achieve Republicans’ goals every time. There is no reason to think this shutdown will end any differently for its left-wing counterpart. The most likely outcome is that Democrats will come to regret having just walked into a trap,” it concluded.
The Washington Post’s editorial page was thrust into the spotlight earlier this year when its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos announced it would focus on “free markets and personal liberties” and no longer publish op-eds that are not supportive of those ideals.
Bezos personally killed an endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris for president that the newspaper’s editorial board had drafted and was prepared to publish in late October, days before the Nov. 5 election that Trump won.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said the shutdown could “ultimately could be a benefit” to taxpayers if the Trump administration uses the opportunity to reduce the federal government in ways the GOP “never had the votes in the Senate to do.”
Trump has threatened mass firings of federal workers and potentially cuts to benefit programs, despite his repeated promises not to cut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.