Congressional Democrats are digging in on the shutdown, but for years, they’ve prided themselves on being the party that wouldn’t use these types of hardball tactics. Now, they say, it’s just a consequence of the times.
“I used to be a public servant. I hate this,” Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J. told MSNBC. “But like, the thing is, I don’t feel like we can pin this on us normalizing it when these are just not normal times.”
Democrats are demanding that any deal to reopen the government also address Obamacare premiums that will, in some cases, more than double as a result of subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. As much as Democrats dislike shutdowns and the prospect of missed paychecks for government workers, they think extending Obamacare subsidies is a fight worth having.
“Right now, it is the critical issue facing our country,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., said of the expiring subsidies. “Already, in many states, people are getting their notices. They’re seeing their premiums double, triple, quadruple.”
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., was similarly unconcerned that Democrats could be normalizing the use of shutdowns as a negotiating tactic.
“We are in ridiculously abnormal times,” Booker said. “The amount of Americans that are going to get hurt as a result of their gutting of Medicaid and their wanting, it seems, to gut the Affordable Care Act.”
Time and again, Democrats argued that the Obamacare premiums, as well as recent actions by the Trump administration — like the rescissions bill that clawed back congressionally approved spending and Elon Musk’s past actions at the Department of Government Efficiency — justified their shutdown approach.
“We’re in highly unusual, even abnormal, times. It’s hard to make a comparison,” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., told MSNBC. “I can’t imagine a Democrat taking a meat ax to the federal government the way DOGE and Donald Trump have.”
The Democratic demands are putting the party in the uncomfortable position of using a shutdown to extract concessions from Republicans, rather than the other way around.
During the 2013 shutdown, which lasted for 16 days, Republicans pushed to defund the Affordable Care Act. And during the 2018 and 2019 impasse, which stretched a record 35 days, President Donald Trump demanded billions of dollars in funding for his long-sought border wall, only to eventually cave to Democrats who rebuffed his efforts.
In both cases, when Congress ultimately voted to reopen the government, those demands were not met.
This time, Democrats think they’ll at least get something — even if that’s just a commitment to expedite the Obamacare premium negotiations.
But if Democrats succeed, they could be charting a course for future congressional standoffs.
The White House last month released a list of Democrats condemning shutdowns in the past — from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, calling shutdowns “a serious and dangerous action that we must do everything possible to prevent” in 2018, to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., warning in 2024 that “if the government shuts down, it will be average Americans who suffer most.”
Invoking Schumer’s vote to advance a GOP-crafted stopgap measure to avert a government shutdown in March, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters on Wednesday that Republicans were not “asking Chuck Schumer, the Democrats do anything different than what they’ve always done.”
During the seven failed votes so far to advance the GOP-crafted stopgap bill, only three members of the Senate Democratic coalition have bucked their party to vote with Republicans.
That includes Sen. John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, who has called shutdowns “always wrong” and has taken issue with his party’s strategy.
“For those people, they want to shut it down — they’ve all said that was wrong when the Republicans did that,” he said.
Fetterman told MSNBC he would support carving out the filibuster “to make it more difficult for a party to shut the government down,” referring to the 60-vote procedural threshold required in the Senate to advance legislation.
But House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., defended his party’s approach this week, alluding to the math in the U.S. Senate — where Republicans need Democratic support to overcome the filibuster.
“We’re not normalizing anything here,” Jeffries said. “If Republicans want Democratic participation in the appropriations process, then that means we actually have to come together, sit down, negotiate a bipartisan bill.”
After trying — and failing — to leverage shutdowns in the past, Republicans are aware that giving in now could change the precedent in the future. It’s one of the reasons GOP leaders say they’re unwilling to negotiate on the subsidies until the government is reopened.
On a conference call with House Republicans on Thursday, Johnson told his members that if Republicans “acquiesce to the Democratic extortion right now, it is only going to be worse next time,” according to a source on the call.
Kevin Frey is a congressional reporter for MS NOW.
Mychael Schnell is a reporter for MS NOW.