The Progressive Attacks on Senate Democrats Over the Shutdown Are Premature
By John Cassidy
January 23, 2018
The New Yorker
Liberal Democrats and progressive activists reacted angrily on Monday after a majority of Senate Democrats voted to enable the federal government to reopen after a three-day shutdown. “It’s morally reprehensible and it’s political malpractice,” Ezra Levin, a former Capitol Hill staffer who co-founded the anti-Trump Indivisible Group, declared. “Schumer led the [Senate] caucus off the cliff.” Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos, accused the Senate Democrats of aiding Republican efforts to block an immigration deal that would protect the Dreamers.
The critics’ arguments merit serious consideration. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise to take up immigration legislation when the spending bill expires in three weeks hardly amounted to a firm commitment to extend legal protections for the Dreamers, which will begin to lapse at the start of March. “The idea that they are gonna take a pinky-swear promise from Senator McConnell after he’s broken so many promises, it’s political malpractice—it’s absurd to believe that,” Levin said. “The only answer is that [they] aren’t actually interested in fighting for the Dreamers.”
That last comment was unfair. In their pursuit of a legislative deal for the Dreamers, Schumer and other Democratic senators took the highly contentious step of shutting down the government. If McConnell doesn’t follow through on his promises, they may well do the same thing again in three weeks’ time. Reopening the government was a tactical move, not a betrayal of the Dreamers. Whether it was the right tactical move won’t be clear for a while, but it was certainly a defensible one, especially in view of the broader political environment.
Progressives worry that Schumer and his colleagues will capitulate again in February, which could happen. But a number of things will be different then. For one thing, they will already have assured six years of funding for chip, the public health-insurance program that serves six million children. As my colleague Amy Davidson Sorkin pointed out yesterday, the inclusion of long-term funding in the new short-term spending resolution amounts to a “solid victory” for Democrats.
The second difference is that, by mid-February, the deadline for reaching an agreement on the Dreamers will be almost upon us. Over the weekend, Democrats were vulnerable to the argument, made by McConnell and others, that they had shut down the government over an issue that doesn’t have to be resolved immediately. In three weeks, Republicans won’t be able to say this.
Thirdly, by February 8th, the “Common Sense Coalition,” a group of twenty-five moderates led by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, which helped resolve the weekend standoff, might well have put forward an actual bill to protect the Dreamers and give Donald Trump the funding he wants to build his non-wall along the border with Mexico. If that bill passes, as seems likely, the White House will be under pressure to declare victory and call on the House Republicans to fall in line.
To be sure, this brings up the question of whether Trump, his White House advisers, and G.O.P. leaders in the House really want a deal, or have the capacity to strike one, given the divisions in the Party. Until now, the White House has insisted that any agreement must include wholesale changes to the system of legal immigration, particularly the lottery system and family-chain migration. On Monday, House Republicans were openly dismissive of McConnell’s offer to bring up legislation, saying it didn’t bind them in any way. Perhaps they will stick to this line, but will that be a sustainable position? As the Huffington Post’s Matt Fuller pointed out, “The Democratic position of not voting for a government funding bill until there’s a daca deal seems much more reasonable if there’s actual legislation that’s passed the Senate and is being ignored in the House. You’d be certain to hear the words, ‘Give us a vote, Mr. Speaker!’ ”
Another key point is that the potential roadblocks to a deal would still be there if the Democrats had again rejected McConnell’s offer. They might be even larger. With the government closed, Trump and the Republicans would be pounding the Democrats, claiming that they were holding hostage two million federal employees. None of the critics of Monday’s deal has explained how the Democrats would have been able to change this dynamic as the shutdown went on and large elements of the public got more disgusted about it. It seems fanciful to suppose that Trump, whose entire outlook on life is circumscribed by his obsession over whether he is “winning” or “losing,” would have capitulated and given the Democrats a better deal than the one McConnell offered.
By agreeing to reopen the government, the Democrats didn’t insure the Dreamers will be protected: the critics are right about that. But they didn’t give the house away, either, and they veered off a path that could have been politically perilous, not just for the outcome of the immigration debate but also for the midterms.
Ever since Trump took office, the Democrats’ biggest advantage has been that they are widely seen as the reasonable alternative, or at least the lesser evil, while the Republicans have gone to dangerous extremes under an unfit and divisive President. Once the Senate Democrats voted not to fund the government, a tactic previously associated with the likes of Newt Gingrich and Ted Cruz, Republicans seized on the opportunity to challenge this narrative. According to the Washington Post, they werealready making robocalls to voters in marginal states saying Democrats had “prioritized illegal immigrants over American citizens.”
Understandably, many Democrats who are facing election battles in districts that voted for Trump didn’t like the way this was heading. By agreeing to a temporary funding bill and embracing a bipartisan approach, they called a halt. Come February, if the bipartisan effort fails, or Trump and Ryan continue to stonewall, they will be in position to claim the higher ground and point to the immediate harm that is about to be done to countless hardworking individuals who were brought to the United States as children, through no choice of their own, and who, in many cases, have never known another home. Polls indicate that the American public overwhelmingly favors doing something about this.
Of course, being reasonable isn’t necessarily the route to political success. The Republicans weren’t reasonable during their 2013 government shutdown, but they still picked up seats in 2014. In midterm elections, when turnout is lower than in Presidential elections, it is particularly important to enthuse the Party’s core voters. If large numbers of liberal Democrats got turned off by Schumer’s calculating approach, it would be a big blow to the Party’s hopes of regaining control of Congress.
But is that likely to happen? Only if Senate Democrats capitulate in February, when, absent more congressional action, the government will again run out of money, and the debt ceiling will also need to be raised. Schumer and his colleagues still have leverage. As the women’s marches demonstrated, animosity toward Trump and the Republicans among rank-and-file Democrats remains intense. This thing isn’t over.
John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995.