By Aaron Blake · The Washington Post (c) 2024
The federal government has been hurtling toward a shutdown at midnight early Saturday ever since Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump blew up a bipartisan deal to fund the government two days ago. And while Trump had been slow to engage and has provided mixed signals about his desires, there is one consistent through line of his commentary: wanting this to be President Joe Biden’s problem.
“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great, but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch,” Trump said in a statement Wednesday night.
“… If [a shutdown is] going to take place, it’s going to take place during Biden, not during Trump,” he told CBS News on Thursday morning.
“If we don’t get it, then we’re going to have a shutdown, but it’ll be a Biden shutdown, because shutdowns only inure to the person who’s president,” he told ABC News.
“Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President,” he said Friday morning on social media, adding: “If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP.’”
You could sure be forgiven for thinking Trump is preoccupied with the blame game rather than actually cutting a deal – and even that he might be a-okay with a shutdown happening because, in his mind, it would be on Biden. Trump doesn’t take office until Jan. 20.
But Trump’s comments do raise a significant X-factor when it comes to how this all gets resolved: Just who would actually shoulder the blame if and when the government shuts down in about 12 hours? And it’s not just about whether voters punish one side or the other politically; it’s also about which side might feel compelled to cave in the end.
It’s most likely that Trump is wrong, though. Democrats appear to have the leverage here, for a host of reasons.
There are reasons voters could blame Democrats. Most notably, that’s because Democrats still control the Senate and the presidency for a few more weeks, and Biden has largely been publicly AWOL on any shutdown or deal.
It’s also true that Democrats provided the lion’s share of votes against House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-Louisiana) attempt at a deal Thursday, which funded the government at current levels and contained disaster relief, like the original deal, while adding a Trump-requested two-year suspension of the debt limit. All but two Democrats voted against it, citing how the deal cut out funding for community health centers and pediatric cancer research and urging Republicans to honor the original bipartisan agreement.
Thirty-eight House Republicans also bucked Johnson and Trump by voting against the deal – a striking rebuke – but at least Republicans can argue Democrats could have voted for something to keep the government open.
“The Democrats just voted to shut down the government …” Vice President-elect JD Vance said, echoing the GOP line.
But that argument is unlikely to carry the day, for a host of reasons.
The big one is that, while it’s pretty clear the Democratic-controlled Senate can pass some kind of legislation averting a shutdown, it’s not at all clear what the Republican-controlled House can actually pass. Yes, that’s in part because House Democrats wouldn’t vote for it, but House Republicans shouldn’t need Democratic votes to produce results.
Republicans also bear responsibility for crafting a bipartisan deal – negotiated by Johnson and other Republicans with Democrats – and then pulling away. If that deal wasn’t good enough, it would probably have been a good idea not to negotiate it in the first place and make clear which side walked away. (Republicans have expressed frustration that Trump waited until the original deal was negotiated to start making demands.)
And that pullback is a key factor, because polling suggests that Americans take a rather dim view of this kind of late gamesmanship. A Quinnipiac University poll last year showed that 87 percent of Americans said that it’s “inappropriate” to use shutdowns as leverage in policy disagreements, compared to 11 percent who said it is appropriate. A CNN poll the month before showed that 81 percent said it’s not “acceptable” for politicians to threaten a shutdown to achieve their goals, with 19 percent saying it is acceptable.
Republicans will argue – and are arguing – that it’s Democrats who won’t take their deal. And the original, bipartisan deal included some things Democrats had negotiated beyond just regular funding of the government. But it’s pretty clear which side is driving the harder bargain here and struggling to figure out what it actually wants.
And in case you doubt that, all you have to do is ask Republicans themselves. Their own commentary on this, after all, has repeatedly implied and even outright stated that they’re the ones driving this impasse – in ways that are thoroughly unhelpful to the blame-Democrats effort.
Trump early Friday signaled that Republicans should walk away from any deal that doesn’t suspend the debt ceiling – a separate issue from funding the government – through his entire second term.
“Without this, we should never make a deal,” Trump said.
“We’re not cutting deals with Democrats,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) said Friday morning.
“There’s no plan,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina) said after Johnson’s plan failed Thursday, adding: “Trump wants the thing to shut down.”
That’s probably how it will look to the American people, too.