On Thursday, Senate Democrats voted for the 10th time to prolong the federal government shutdown. They also voted against funding the military, thereby necessitating that the Pentagon initiate some innovative accounting in order to ensure service members are paid on time.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) defended his caucus’s latest vote, opining, “It’s always been unacceptable to Democrats to do the defense bill without other bills that have so many things that are important to the American people in terms of health care, in terms of housing, in terms of safety.” But to most Americans, such tendentious bloviating falls on deaf ears. Most commonsense Americans understand that there is no reason paying America’s warriors should be held hostage to arcane debates over housing policy.
As Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), one of three Senate Democrats who joined Republicans on Thursday in support of the defense appropriations bill, put it earlier this week: “You know, if you’re thinking about winning the election, now, that’s all going to come down to seven or eight states. … And a lot of the things, the extremism that people turned their back in ’24, and that’s how we kind of came up short.”
It’s wise advice. But Fetterman is likely to pay for being such a rare voice of (relative) reason within the party with an impending bruising Senate primary contest.
Why exactly “are” Democrats, who control neither chamber of Congress nor the presidency, continuing to insist on a protracted shutdown battle? It’s a more complex question than it ought to be. But the basic disagreement amounts to one over expiring Obamacare subsidies and the scope of Medicaid coverage — pertaining, to no small extent, to illegal aliens.
In short, then, air traffic control operations are suffering from a potentially dangerous shortage, America’s beautiful national parks are understaffed, and service members could go without pay — all, seemingly, because Democrats think more taxpayer dollars should go toward subsidizing the health care of illegal aliens.
This is an astonishingly weak negotiating position. Minority parties completely out of power typically do not get what they want during high-profile Beltway budgetary standoffs or shutdown fights, and there is very little reason to expect Republicans to cave. As the shutdown goes on, moreover, the polling on which side is more to blame seems to be gradually shifting toward Democrats as the more blameworthy side.
It is far from obvious what exactly Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) expect to accomplish as the shutdown barrels ahead toward its third week. They are not going to prevail — and the longer it goes on, the worse political shape they will find themselves in.
