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It’s always a complicated matter to say who is “winning” a shutdown fight. By one measure, no one “wins” since voters are unhappy with everyone and more generally the “system” for letting things get to such a point of dysfunction. Polls provide one of our most objective measures. But majority opinion isn’t always the terrain that one or both parties is playing to. What’s more, it may be fickle. If it doesn’t last until the next election, does it even matter? The real measure is who’s moving and who’s not, who is coming off their first positions, negotiating with themselves? By this measure — and in fact the others too — Democrats are pretty clearly winning the current shutdown fight.
Polls have been clear: more Americans blame Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown then Democrats. Every poll that I’m aware of has shown this. Republicans now say the latest polls show the blame divide narrowing in their favor. And it’s possible that’s true, though it could just as easily be noise in the polls. And in any case losing by slightly less isn’t exactly a big rallying cry. The real evidence is who is budging. The shutdown started with the White House saying it absolutely wouldn’t budge and threatening a big new round of layoffs to punish Democrats into submission. More and more evidence now shows that the firings threat was a bluff the White House feels unable to follow through on. As this has become more obvious, they’ve been forced to say that they’ve simply decided to delay the firings for no apparent reason. Even the elite media outlets which for days were passing on the White House threats as news are now, belatedly, seeing that it’s not happening, at least not yet. After failing to follow through on that threat, the White House and OMB moved to a new threat: no back pay. But that seems as empty a threat as the first one. In any negotiation or test of wills the failure to follow through on a threat always signals weakness. And these are no different.
News comes today that Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is now threatening not to pay back pay to federal employees after this shutdown ends. There’s both more and less here than meets the eye. The step Vought has taken is to remove references to back pay from OMB guidance about the shutdown. The backpay rule is not based on OMB guidance. It’s federal law. And even better than that, it’s a federal law Trump signed.
Yes, yes, I know: federal law isn’t a big constraint on Trump White House planning. Make of that one what you will. But I want to zoom in on something else. The big, big threat coming from Vought was that the Trump administration would use the opportunity of the shutdown to institute large-scale firings of federal employees on the unsupported theory that the shutdown opened up more powers to fire federal employees. That’s not true. But that doesn’t matter. Because the Supreme Court has already given Trump power to fire as many federal employees as he wants, federal law notwithstanding.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve had in the last nine months and especially since the summer is how to convey both the very brittle, thin nature of Trump’s power and also the scale of the threat his government poses. Jamelle Bouie captured a key dimension of this in a weekend column in the Times: if you wanted to drive the country into literal disunion it’s hard to imagine what you’d do differently than what he is doing right now. He is both rhetorically and (with increasing intensity) literally unleashing the U.S. military on the strongest bastions of opposition to his government (basically blue cities in blue states). He is also canceling more and more of the funding the federal government gives to those states, despite the fact that it is disproportionately funded by taxes from those states. This is definitionally fairly close to warlordism, a broken state in which the leader holds on to power — if not legitimacy — by hoarding state resources for loyalists and depriving opponents of any of them.
I have a deep ideological commitment to the American union. And beyond ideology, red and blue states are largely a fiction. The big red and blue states have huge minorities of the other “side” within their borders. Still, governance on these terms is illegitimate and unsustainable. The only recourse is a much more aggressive use of the sovereign powers of the states than state governments are currently doing.
We’ve done two live editions of our podcast (The Josh Marshall Podcast Featuring Kate Riga) so far this year, one in DC in January and then a second in Chicago in May. And now we’re bringing the show to New York City on Nov. 6. If you’d like to see Kate and me live in person for the recording of the podcast, along with a Q&A and open bar happy hour to follow (get me drunk, I’m more fun), you can buy tickets now. Just click here.
If you’re not in New York we’re planning to come to the West Coast soon and … well, even other parts of the country that aren’t DC, Chicago, New York or Seattle. Also, don’t @ me. I’m from St Louis.
“I think we’re at a point where anything from the federal government has to be treated with a certain amount of skepticism, if not suspicion,” one expert told TPM.
Here’s an incomplete list of federal data and statistics that’ve been deleted or tampered with since Trump took office.
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