Everybody in Washington hates a shutdown until it becomes a useful tool

WASHINGTON (AP) – The U.S. government had shut down, and Donald Trump was calling on Democrats and Republicans to work together to get out of the mess.

“You have to get people in a room, and you have to just make deals for the good of the country,” Trump remarked.

The year was 2013, and Trump was then a business mogul who had yet to enter politics. Now that he is president, Trump and his fellow Republicans are taking a strikingly different posture, refusing to negotiate with Democrats in a shutdown that the GOP say the minority party instigated.

Just last year, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York was criticizing ideologues who “amazingly believe that causing a shutdown is somehow a good thing, if it gets them what they want.” Now Schumer and most other Democrats are rejecting bills to open and fund the government because they want health care provisions included.

If you’ve been in Washington long enough, you’ve most likely argued both sides of a shutdown. Both parties have used the threat of shutdowns to force a policy outcome and both sides have decried the other for doing the same. Nobody likes a shutdown, but each side insists the American people are on their side – whether their side is supporting a shutdown or not.

“Everybody just makes the mistake of believing in the righteousness of their positions, and it blinds them to the reality of shutdowns,” said Brendan Buck, who served as a top aide to House Speakers John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Paul Ryan, R-Wis. “It’s a political messaging exercise framed as a negotiating tactic, but there’s very little evidence that it really serves a policymaking purpose. It is more just a platform to talk about what’s important to you.”

Not many politicians, save the few moderates who always chafe at shutdown maneuvers, are immune.

When Vice President JD Vance was a senator last year and when Congress, yet again, was on the brink of a funding lapse, he made an assertive case for using government funding as leverage to get what Republicans wanted.

“Why shouldn’t we be trying to force this government shutdown fight to get something out of it that’s good for the American people?” Vance asked in a September 2024 podcast interview. “Why have a government if it’s not a functioning government?”

Vance is taking a much different approach now. Standing with GOP leaders at the White House this week, he said it was “not reasonable” for Democrats to use their proposals “as leverage and to shut down the government unless we give you everything you want.”

In 2013, when Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren was in her first Senate term, she argued in a floor speech that the “bare minimum that we can do” would be to pass a short-term funding bill “to keep the doors open and the lights on.”

Now, Warren has twice voted against a stopgap measure pushed by GOP lawmakers and the White House.

“Democrats are at the negotiating table. We don’t have a long list of demands. We’re not saying we need to find more money,” Warren wrote on the social media site X. “We just want Republicans to restore the health care coverage they took away from millions of Americans.”

What changes from each shutdown scenario is what specific policy the instigating party wants out of it.

In the fall of 2013, Republicans headed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and House conservatives were adamant that any government funding bill needed to strip money from the Affordable Care Act and they led the nation into a 16-day shutdown. In January 2018, it was Democrats who were insisting that any government spending bill offer legal protections to “Dreamers,” young people who were brought to the United States illegally as children by family. Trump refused to negotiate, and the shutdown ended after three days.

Later in Trump’s first term, he demanded money for a U.S.-Mexico border wall that lawmakers would not approve. Trump said he would “be the one to shut it down” as he sparred with congressional leaders over who would be responsible for the closures. That partial shutdown lasted 35 days.

One common theme is that the party forcing the shutdown hardly ever gets what it wants.

The Obama-era health law was not defunded, Democrats only got a vote on protecting “Dreamers” and Trump had to declare a national emergency to get money for his border wall. If past is prologue, that would suggest Democrats this time will not get what they want: an extension of health care subsidies for people who purchase plans through “Obamacare,” plus a reversal of Medicaid cuts put in place through the GOP’s signature tax law earlier this year.

Michael Thorning, who worked for former Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said he believes shutdowns are happening more often because both Democrats and Republicans have concluded “that the public is not going to punish them at the polls.”

“It’s hard to see any pattern of public accountability there,” said Thorning, now the director of the structural democracy project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “I think that has probably reduced the riskiness of what was seen as a pretty hardball tactic.”

Two years ago, while Democrat Joe Biden was president, Trump posted on Truth Social that any Republican fears of being blamed for a shutdown were overblown.

“Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed,” he wrote, later adding, “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!”

Asked for comment on Trump’s previous shutdown-related comments, the White House press office did not respond immediately. Their general press line gave an automatic message that due to “resulting from the Democrat Shutdown, the typical 24/7 monitoring of this press inbox may experience delays.”

Later, spokeswoman Abigail Jackson responded that “Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are so desperate to distract from their decision to shut down the government that they’re making the AP write stories on their week old Instagram posts.” She was referring to a post from Schumer’s account that featured Trump’s comments from 2013.

“Here’s the truth: Democrats shut down the government because they want free health care for illegal aliens and they know it hurts the American people,” Jackson said. “Just listen to their own statements.”