As the March 14 government shutdown deadline approached, Republican leaders recognized a few key factual details. They knew they’d have to pursue a plan that met with Donald Trump’s approval; they knew they’d need a bill that could pass the GOP-led House, despite the party’s tiny majority; and they knew that whatever they passed would need at least some Democratic support in the Senate.
Threading such a needle posed obvious challenges. What kind of federal spending legislation would satisfy the president and the House Freedom Caucus on one side, and several Democratic senators on the other?
Republican leaders settled on a straightforward plan: They’d pass a partisan stopgap bill — called a “continuing resolution,” or “CR” — that made their own party happy. Democrats would be entirely and deliberately excluded from the negotiations, and the measure was practically designed to insult members of the Democratic minority.
Democrats wanted new safeguards to address abuses from the White House and Elon Musk? The Republican plan would ignore those concerns. Democrats wanted a clean CR? The Republican plan would ignore those pleas, too, increasing defense spending, while reducing non-defense discretionary spending.
For good measure, GOP leaders added provisions that would make it impossible for Congress to undo Trump’s trade tariffs, and threw in more than $1.5 billion to start building a warship that the Navy didn’t ask for.
At this point, many readers are probably asking a good question: If Republicans have long realized that the bill to prevent a shutdown would need Democratic support in the Senate, why push legislation that Senate Democrats would obviously hate?
The answer is simple: GOP leaders simply assumed that Democrats in the Senate wouldn’t have the stomach for a real fight. Republicans could craft a partisan bill on their own and jam it down Democrats’ throats — in part because Democrats wouldn’t want a government shutdown, and in part because Democrats feared being blamed for a government shutdown, despite GOP control of Congress and the White House.
As Wednesday got underway on Capitol Hill, the scuttlebutt was that Democrats were, in fact, prepared to cave. By midday, however, the winds appeared to shift direction. NBC News reported:
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday that Democrats would reject a government funding bill that Republicans wrote and passed through the House, leaving it uncertain whether Congress can avert a shutdown before Friday night’s deadline. … He spoke after a lunch meeting between Democratic senators on Wednesday. They went in torn over whether to vote for the House’s six-month measure, with some worried that a shutdown would be worse, even as they widely disapprove of the House bill.
For Democrats, this is not a binary choice between the partisan House bill and a shutdown. Instead, they offered a constructive alternative: A stopgap measure that would keep the government’s lights on through April 11, giving lawmakers roughly a month to settle on a bipartisan solution.
This led some news outlets to run headlines about Democrats playing “hardball” with the Republican majorities, and it’s easy to understand why. Indeed, on the surface, it seemed as if Schumer and his colleagues had drawn a line in the sand: With time running out, they simply weren’t prepared to accept the partisan GOP bill.
But just below the surface, there was a problem. How long, exactly, were Democrats prepared to play “hardball”? Or more to the point, how firm was the party’s commitment to opposing the offensive Republican legislation? As Congress wrapped up for the day, the chatter on Capitol Hill was that Democrats were exploring a strategy in which Republicans would allow a vote on their April 11 stopgap plan, and in exchange, the Democratic minority would agree to allow a vote on the partisan House GOP plan. Axios published a report quoting Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia saying, “Democrats had nothing to do with this bill. And we want an opportunity to get an amendment vote or two. So that’s what we are insisting on to vote for cloture.” Everyone knows full well, of course, what the outcome of those votes would be — Republicans have 53 votes in the upper chamber, offering them a buffer if Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky balks at the House plan — which is why it looks like a Democratic retreat by another name. That said, a lot can happen in a day and a half, and there’s likely to be plenty of lobbying and arm-twisting ahead of the Friday night deadline. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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