Sometimes, when you’re angry, you need to take out your aggression on something. Having a punching bag can be therapeutic. And while Chuck Schumer might look useless this week, he is in fact playing the useful role of punching bag to Democrats who are angry because they want something they cannot have: control over the policy agenda despite having lost the last national election.
Democrats in both chambers of Congress are denouncing Mr. Schumer and this deal to end the government shutdown that their voters hate. But they offer no plausible account of how they would have done better, because there isn’t one.
Senator Schumer had little choice but to lead his party into a shutdown fight. Democratic officials, activists, commentators and the base were insistent. But they also expected the shutdown to lead to some sort of significant public policy win for Democrats.
There were a few problems with this, one of which was that there was no agreement among Democrats about what kind of policy change was needed to reopen the government: Congressional leaders focused on health care, ultimately demanding an extension of subsidies for Affordable Care Act exchange health plans, at a cost of about $23 billion for 2026. But other Democrats were focused on President Trump’s undermining of the bipartisan appropriations process or had broader concerns about authoritarianism that could not be addressed through any obvious concession other than Mr. Trump’s resignation.
The government shutdown as we know it is a relatively recent phenomenon, following a series of early 1980s Justice Department memos saying the government has to close if appropriations lapse, and no modern government shutdown has produced significant policy concessions to the party that was making policy demands. Shutdowns haven’t worked for Republicans, who hoped to defund Obamacare in 2013, or Democrats, who in early 2018 demanded legislative protections for Dreamers.
They always end the way the one this week appears to be ending, with no concessions or some minor wins for the party making demands — in this case, the reversal of layoffs during the shutdown and a prohibition on new ones through January, as well as the funding of some smaller Democratic priorities, like the continued funding of the Government Accountability Office.
This time, there was an extra-strong reason a shutdown couldn’t work: Republicans did not actually need Democratic votes to reopen the government. At all times during this shutdown, Republicans had three options: They could keep the shutdown going, they could bend rules to reopen the government without Democrats’ votes or they could agree to extend the enhanced A.C.A. subsidy program they oppose. If at any time they ran out of patience with the first option, they could move to the second option; at no time did they have to agree to Democrats’ policy demands.
Indeed, Republicans’ total control was a core part of the Democratic message during the shutdown: Democrats kept pointing out that Republicans held the majority and therefore the shutdown was all their choice. If you keep telling people that Republicans don’t need your help to reopen the government, why would you expect them to make a major policy concession to you in exchange for your help reopening the government?
