Democrats didn’t cave on the shutdown

Here are some thoughts on today’s three-week deal in Congress to reopen the government, take a vote on an unspecified immigration bill, and fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program for six years:

1) There’s a rollicking debate on Twitter over whether Democrats “caved.” I’ll confess that I’m mystified by this argument. For the moment, this seems like a good deal — but it’s impossible to say anything definitive without knowing what happens over the next three weeks.

2) Consider what we don’t know about what comes next. We don’t know which immigration bill, or bills, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will bring to the Senate floor. We don’t know if any immigration compromise passes the Senate. We don’t know if an immigration bill that passes the Senate will get a vote in the House. Even if it does get a vote in the House, we don’t know if it’ll pass. And if it does pass, we don’t know if Trump will sign it.

3) We also don’t know what the implicit Democratic position is here. If Democrats get a fair vote in the House and Senate on an immigration deal and it doesn’t pass, will they shut down the government again in three weeks? Put differently, is this a deal about a fair process or about a particular outcome? If Democrats don’t get a deal and they shut the government back down in three weeks, it’s hard to see what was lost here.

4) Democratic opponents of the deal believe that an extended shutdown increases the likelihood of a DREAMer compromise. But does it? That is to say that an extended shutdown will cause Trump so much political or personal pain that he will accept one of the immigration compromises he has thus far rejected. Neither dynamic is obvious to me.

5) Politically, Trump’s entire brand is anti-immigration politics, and if there is round-the-clock news coverage of a shutdown over immigration, he’ll think it’s good for his base. Personally, Trump’s goal in life is to be seen as a winner, and to double down when attacked or under pressure, and so it’s hard to see how a high-stakes battle over a shutdown — which would make a deal on immigration look like a cave to reopen the government by Trump — helps.

6) Beyond that, shutting down the government should be a last resort in the most extreme situations (if that). And historically, shutting down the government usually doesn’t end with the party that forced the shutdown getting the policy concessions it wants — it often strengthens the president’s party. To the extent there’s an open path in which an immigration deal can be negotiated and brought to a vote with the government still open, that’s a good thing.

7) One counterargument: McConnell’s word hasn’t been worth much this year. Just ask Sens. Susan Collins (ME) and Jeff Flake (AZ), fellow Republicans who were promised health and immigration policies in return for their tax votes. In this case, though, if McConnell reneges on the deal, Democrats simply shut down the government in three weeks. They haven’t lost that leverage.

8) And if Democrats do need to shut down the government in three weeks, they’ll do so with the Children’s Health Insurance Program funded for six years, rather than seeing it weaponized against them. That’s a big deal, both substantively and politically.

9) There’s a broader political dynamic worth considering here too. Republicans pioneered a brand of politics in which creating crises in government operations became proof of sincerity, regardless of whether it led to good outcomes or who got hurt along the way. If you didn’t employ every tactic in service of your promises to the base, you were a liar — it wasn’t acceptable to say, “We don’t have the votes; we need to win more elections.”

10) At the time, Democrats angrily criticized that approach, arguing that all-out tactical war would be terrible for the country, that some boundaries and norms were worth preserving, that elections were the proper method of resolution. Now I’m hearing a lot of the same arguments from Democrats: If they don’t shut the government down, or keep it shut down, it will be a betrayal of their base.

11) Democrats also feel, understandably, that they can’t unilaterally disarm. If Republicans are going to use the basic functioning of the government as leverage, then Democrats have to do so too.

12) The logic of that is inarguable, and the consequences disastrous. If hostage-taking becomes normalized in American politics, then there’s really no end to the cycle of escalation, and it’s going to finish with a global economic crisis because we breached the debt ceiling, or worse.

13) The central political problem in American life, for years now, has been that the Republican Party is a dysfunctional institution that has abandoned principles of decent governance in order to please an ever more extreme base. I don’t have an answer for fixing that. But it would be doubly bad if their outrageous behavior drives Democrats to use the same tactics in response. American politics is, hopefully, an infinite game, not a finite game, and that means doing everything possible to steer away from retaliatory loops that clearly lead to the system crumbling.