When was the last time I wrote about Democrats in this newsletter?
The question occurred to me because, for once, the top news in politics today has to do with the out-party and I was struck by how rare that’s been since January 20—or even November 5. So I skimmed the archives.
My last piece about the left was published on February 26. My last piece about congressional Democrats came alllllll the way back on January 10.
“That’s because you have Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a populist would say. Nuh uh. TDS no longer exists, assuming it ever did.
“It’s because Republicans control the presidency and both houses of Congress,” a more sensible reader would note. The only shred of federal power Democrats enjoy right now is the Senate filibuster, and even that carries exceptions for presidential nominees and legislation subject to budget reconciliation. If you’re writing about national politics, how much is there to say about a faction that wields practically zero influence over national politics?
I mean, I haven’t written about the Libertarian or Green Parties lately either. What’s the difference?
Okay, fine: There’s a difference. Unlike the Libertarians and Greens, Democrats can shut down the government by filibustering the House funding bill that’ll soon hit the Senate floor. And given how tough even the moderates in their conference are talking, it sounds like they’re ready to pull the trigger.
It’s a big risk! It’s risky politically for them because they’re on the wrong side of a “clean” funding bill this time, the kind of no-frills legislation they normally demand of Republicans whenever the GOP starts agitating for spending cuts. Good luck convincing Americans that Trump is to blame for agencies shutting down when he’s simply asking Democrats to extend Biden-era appropriations for another six months. A shutdown would also undercut left-wing attacks on DOGE: If keeping federal workers on the job is so important, why are liberals creating a situation that will require thousands of them to be furloughed?
It’s risky policy-wise too. Politico reported on Thursday that White House officials are relishing the idea that “when coffers run dry, the Trump administration—specifically [Russell] Vought, the longtime cost-cutting conservative now running OMB—would have unprecedented flexibility to choose which agencies get to stay open and which don’t.” Bureaus that are beloved by the left, like the Environmental Protection Agency, will presumably be the first to be shuttered. And many workers across the federal government who end up furloughed will probably not be invited back by Vought and Elon Musk when the standoff ends.
Even the Democratic endgame is unclear. Unless the public reacts to a shutdown by siding decisively with them against Trump, the minority party will eventually be forced to capitulate by agreeing to the same sort of “clean” funding bill they’re preparing to filibuster right now.
There’s very little upside to what Democrats are poised to do. So why do they sound gung ho to do it?
I think they’re desperate to reassure themselves that American politics isn’t, well, over. But it is, mostly. At least for the next few years.
Two aces.
To understand why the current moment differs from typical one-party rule in Washington, consider the pep talk House Republicans received this week from Vice President J.D. Vance.
Normally, conservatives in the House despise “clean” funding bills. They dependably refuse to rubber-stamp new spending without concessions aimed at trimming current spending. Some (until this week) had never voted for a “continuing resolution” (CR) on principle, because they couldn’t bear to carry forward the budgetary status quo even for a few months.
All of which is to say that politics doesn’t typically “end” just because one party controls the White House and Congress. Separation of powers compels the president to jockey with his own allies in the House and Senate for control over the direction of policy. Look no further than Donald Trump’s first term for an example: The tax cuts that passed in 2017 resembled Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s fantasy legislation a lot more than it did the average blue-collar populist’s.
Plenty of Republicans are, were, and will forever be leery of “clean” funding bills, and given how narrow the party’s majority is in the House, they had the numbers to tank the Trump-approved CR that was offered to them this week. That’s what the vice president was up against when he met with the House conference on Tuesday. But he had an ace up his sleeve. Two aces, really.
According to reporter Reese Gorman of NOTUS, Vance’s message to members on the “clean” funding bill was this: “I want everyone to vote Yes. The President, under Section II, will ensure allocations from Congress are not spent on things that harm the taxpayer.”
Semafor’s Dave Weigel elaborated. “The reason the CR dynamics shifted so much—why Rs are now happy to vote for it and Ds don’t mind opposing it—is the specter of impoundment,” he wrote. “Every Dem previously voted for Ed/USAID etc funding; every Dem watched Trump claw it back. They (predictably) got nowhere trying to Elon-proof new spending and ensure it would go out. Changed their incentives.”
If you’re having trouble deciphering all of that, let me simplify. Vance told House Republicans that they should go ahead and keep current spending as-is because the president himself will make “cuts” by withholding money from recipients whom he, in his wisdom, deems unworthy. That’s impoundment, and if left unchecked by the courts it’ll effectively gut Congress’ power of the purse. After all, if the executive gets to decide which checks written by the legislature get cashed and which don’t then it doesn’t matter how exorbitantly Congress spends. It could pass a bill authorizing a gazillion dollars in outlays and simply leave it to Trump to choose which outlays should go out the door and which shouldn’t.
That pitch was enough to convince every House Republican except one to support a “clean” CR—and every House Democrat except one to oppose it. As Weigel says, why should the out-party support a “clean” funding bill that isn’t actually clean in practice? As long as Trump is asserting the power to impound funding and nuke disfavored agencies like USAID, a vote for the bill is little more than a vote to give him the final say over how federal money is and isn’t spent.
Hence Vance’s two aces. The first is the fear—and not just electoral fear—that congressional Republicans feel at the thought of defying Trump in a big spot, like a vote to avert a government shutdown during his first 100 days in office. There’s no analogue in American history for a president encouraging the degree of cultish devotion among his base that Trump has and weaponizing that devotion against recalcitrant members of his own party to intimidate them into falling in line.
Separation of powers doesn’t work if one branch is afraid to separate from another. When Vance walked into the meeting with House Republicans this week, he knew that everyone there (save Thomas Massie) was desperate for an excuse to vote yes and spare themselves the venom they’d receive for joining with “the enemy” to force a shutdown on national savior Donald Trump.
What we’re experiencing, in other words, is less one-party control of government than one-branch control, far more than even in 2017. With a lone possible exception, intraparty politics in the GOP is effectively over.
Which brings us to Vance’s other ace. In this case, one-branch control means one-person control in practice.
A simulacrum of normalcy.
The vice president’s impoundment pitch to House Republicans was more than just a partisan request that they yield to Trump’s wishes. It was a request that they cede their branch’s constitutional power to him.
It wasn’t even a request. Vance informed the conference that the president intends to withhold some appropriations from whatever bill they might pass and hoped that the prospect of him doing so would suffice to scratch the eternal conservative itch for spending cuts.
I can’t imagine a more complete perversion of the Tea Party ethos that launched modern right-wing populism than that. Tea Partiers purported to be constitutional sticklers, obsessed with restraining a “tyrannical” president and bent on using Republican legislative leverage to impose discipline on the federal budget. Fifteen years later, their political descendants in Congress are tossing the power of the purse to the White House and encouraging it to do whatever it thinks is best.
There’s a lot in that vein happening in government right now. To a degree none of us have seen, Trump is normalizing consolidation of power in the presidency. There’s a simulacrum of politics as usual, like the House going through the motions to pass a “clean” funding bill, but beneath the surface, the president is setting all sorts of policy unilaterally.
That “new normal” was the other ace up Vance’s sleeve. With Trump calling the shots regarding most other arms of federal authority, why shouldn’t House Republicans also trust him to make the spending decisions that Congress traditionally would have made? Politics as we’ve known it is over. Might as well lean into it.
Take tariffs. There’s a simulacrum of politics as usual there insofar as Trump’s authority to impose and un-impose (and impose and un-impose…) tariffs is almost certainly legal, gifted to the president by Congress in various statutes over the years that grant executive “emergency” power over tariffs. But the helter skelter of the last seven weeks is the opposite of normal politics: Trump is setting trade policy by himself and he’s doing it as chaotically as possible, with only the barest pretense of an “emergency” to justify it.
The Republican majorities in Congress could rescind his authority at any time but, for reasons I explained earlier, they don’t dare. The president decides now which foreign countries are taxed.
How about DOGE cuts? The White House plainly enjoys some power to reform federal agencies—politics as usual!—but effectively dismantling them, as Trump and Elon Musk have done in at least one case, is supposed to require buy-in from Congress. The president decides now which departments functionally exist and which don’t.
How about NATO? Under Trump, the United States remains a nominal member of the alliance and can’t withdraw from it without Senate approval. Politics as usual! Except that he’s switched sides in the Ukraine war, spooked European powers into considering nuclearization, and provided zero reason to believe he’ll honor the United States’ Article 5 obligations if Russia attacks a NATO member. The president decides now which treaties are followed and which aren’t.
How about Cabinet nominations? Everything there was done by the book, with the Senate confirming all of the president’s nominees. Politics as usual! But the pressure tactics Trump used on them were unprecedented, demanding that Senate Republicans recess and forfeit their advice-and-consent power if they couldn’t muster the votes to confirm his nominees. That left them with no political cover among the GOP base to reject anyone, with predictable results. And Trump’s fondness for dubious “acting” appointees during his first term meant that we probably would have ended up with a clown leading the FBI even if Kash Patel had gone down in flames. The president decides now whether his nominees are fit to serve.
Everything important that’s happened over the past eight weeks has been superficially “normal,” but substantively irregular. Even the basic enforcement of federal criminal laws now depends on whether the president regards the defendant as a friend or enemy. If you don’t think politics as we’ve known it is over, consider the grotesque spectacle of federal lawmakers, who are constitutionally in charge of spending, begging Elon Musk not to cut expenditures that might affect jobs in their district.
It’s the end of politics. Democrats don’t know what to do.
Shutdown theater.
That, I take it, is why support for a shutdown keeps trickling in even from swing-state Senate Dems. This is the first opportunity they’ve had during Trump’s presidency to exert any control whatsoever over our national freak show, and they might not have another until fall.
American politics has ended, at least temporarily. The out-party has to do something to try to reverse that, no? Even if that something risks making it toxic to swing voters.
One can make a case that no political party since the start of the Reagan Revolution has been as powerless as Democrats are right now. The only comparison is the bloody heap Republicans were left in after the Democratic sweep in 2008 that briefly gave liberals a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. But for all the right-wing panic at the time about Barack Obama changing the “nature” of America, his neoliberal project was far less revolutionary in its ambitions than the postliberal project on which Trump and his devotees have embarked.
Republicans in 2009 had to worry about Democrats ramming through a bunch of expensive statist policies. Democrats in 2025 have to worry about Republicans rebalancing the constitutional order so heavily in favor of autocracy that the left will struggle to restrain Trump even if it regains a degree of federal power in 2026. The end of politics isn’t a byproduct of postliberalism, it’s the point. It’s the essence of “knowing what time it is.”
If Democrats shut the government down, that’ll be why. They’ve been rendered powerless, it’s uncertain if—not even when—that will change, so they’re going to exert what little power they have and let the chips fall where they may.
As a strategic matter, I find the plan dubious. But as a psychological matter, it’s understandable. Remember, Democrats are also in the middle of a hellacious identity crisis triggered by November’s catastrophe, one that gets weirder by the hour. And their anxiety about having no control over events is compounded by the fact that, increasingly, it feels like no one in the ruling party has control over events either. There’s a measles outbreak happening in America right now and this absolute lunatic is technically in charge of the federal response. If you had one chance to impose a degree of order on chaos as sinister as that, even if it were a longshot that required a shutdown, wouldn’t you yearn to take it?
We end with an easy prediction: If Democrats end up regaining the House majority in 2026, two years of frustration at being powerless to stop a cadre of proto-fascist crackpots from wrecking the government will manifest in a degree of bitter congressional obstructionism unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
The out-party is always bitter when it returns to power after being shut out for a while, but a Democratic House confronting Trump in 2027 will be a different kind of beast. After watching the president run roughshod over limits on his power for two years with the full acquiescence of his party, the mandate for House Democrats will be simple and stark: Stop him at all costs. Stop the autocracy, stop the DOGE rampage, stop the bullying of American allies, stop the corruption and self-enrichment, stop the anti-vax witch-doctoring, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
Hakeem Jeffries had better eat his Wheaties. But until then, shutdown theater is all he and his party have to interrupt the end of politics.
