Democrats Fought for a Shutdown. They Got One. Now What?

Democrats Boxed Themselves Into A Shutdown Disaster

As of this writing, the government shutdown is entering its sixth day, with neither Democrats nor Republicans willing to moderate their positions. We are likely to see a Day 7, Day 8, even a Day 9 and beyond, unless one side or the other blinks.

Will either side blink any time soon? The prevailing rhetoric suggests that is not going to happen, with Speaker Mike Johnson indicating that there are no plans even for budget negotiations at present. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer confirmed that the unwillingness to negotiate is the one point of agreement between Democrats and Republicans over the shutdown.

With even corporate media comparing the shutdown to a game of “chicken”, the question must be asked which side has even an incentive to seek budget negotiations at this point. Within their respective narratives of political blame, both the Democrats and Republicans have made it clear they believe the other party is in the weaker position, and will therefore be the first to negotiate.

“I don’t want a shutdown. The president of the United States doesn’t want a shutdown. Republicans in the Senate don’t want a shutdown,” said Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), the chair of the House Appropriations Committee.

“If there’s a shutdown, it’s because Democrats wanted to shut it down.”

Democrats responded in kind, arguing that Republicans control all the levers of power in Washington and, therefore, GOP leaders would be responsible for any shutdown that occurs.

“We’ve heard all year how Republicans have a mandate, how Republicans have the presidency, how Republicans control the House, how Republicans control the Senate. Well, if that, in fact, is the case — as is the moment, temporarily — Republicans will own a government shutdown. Period. Full stop,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said.

“It’s the Republican shutdown.”

However, when we step back from the blame-game narratives of the parties themselves, and look to the narratives being put forward across most media outlets, be they corporate or alternative, any presumed strength in the Democrats’ position evaporates almost completely. Even media commentary notionally favorable to the Democrats reveals major weaknesses in their arguments rationalizing the shutdown.

Regardless of how one views the policies and politics of either side, the Democrats have flubbed this shutdown badly, so badly they may not even have an offramp from the shutdown other than total surrender.

This shutdown is not merely the “Schumer Shutdown”, it’s the “Silly Schumer Shutdown”. Barring a major faux pas by the Republicans, the Democrats have no realistic hope of achieving a political victory in either Congress or among voters beyond their base.

They did this to themselves.

The Shutdown Nobody Wanted To Avoid

I want to emphasize one point especially: neither side was at all interested in avoiding a government shutdown as the clock wound down on passing the 2026 federal budget. I’ve made this comment before and I have not seen any reason to think otherwise.

Corporate media reporting right before the shutdown offers some confirmation for this assessment.

Centrist senators are giving up hope of avoiding a government shutdown this week after a contentious meeting between President Trump and congressional leaders Monday failed to make progress on a short-term funding bill.

One Democratic senator who requested anonymity said it’s now highly unlikely that Trump and congressional leaders will reach any preliminary agreement to allow a funding bill to pass by Tuesday’s deadline.

The source said both GOP and Democratic leaders appear to be itching for a shutdown and feeling confident they’ll score political points with their parties’ bases.

With neither side opposed to a government shutdown, we should not give the blame narratives of either side even a moment’s consideration. The Democrats are hardly in a position to be blaming the Republicans for allowing the shutdown Democrats desired to happen. Similarly, the Republicans have no grounds for blaming the Democrats for pushing a shutdown Republicans were hoping would happen.

Republicans Not Going To Waste The Shutdown “Crisis”

As Democrat Rahm Emmanuel reminded people back in 2008, in politics “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The Republicans have made it plain since before the shutdown started they have no intention of “wasting” the government shutdown. In the days leading up to the shutdown, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to all government agencies to prepare not merely for furloughs in the event of a shutdown, but mass layoffs as well.

“Programs that did not benefit from an infusion of mandatory appropriations will bear the brunt of a shutdown, and we must continue our planning efforts in the event Democrats decide to shut down the government,” reads the memo, which was emailed to agency leadership and general counsels.

It was pure coincidence the memo also found its way to the media.

Right after the shutdown began, President Trump trolled the Democrats, posting on Truth Social that agencies and programs cherished by Democrats were going to bear the brunt of the Administration’s efforts to slash government spending further during the shutdown.

No sooner had the shutdown started on October 1 when OMB Director Russell Vought targeted New York City infrastructure projects for some $18 Billion in cuts.

Later that day, Director Vought followed up with a further $8 Billion in cuts to “green” energy programs—all targeting Democrat-run or Democrat-leaning states.

The lack of subtlety was not lost in the reporting by alt-media outlets such as ZeroHedge and Breitbart. Both outlets noted that the announced spending holds and cancellations were landing in the Democrats’ back yard, and that Democrat politicians were complaining rather loudly about the naked partisanship being shown by the Trump Administration.

In a rare moment of media consensus, with corporate media reporting reflecting the same sentiments among Democrats, the Republican message (at least, the Trump Administration message) is clear: They are treating this shutdown as a political fight and intend to push as much pain on Democratic constituencies as possible. There will be no “fairness”, no equitable sharing of fiscal pain, in what the Trump Administration does.

“FAFO” is now official government policy.

Healthcare Narratives Don’t Help Democrats

With the media landscape reflecting the increasing polarization within America’s politics, it comes as no surprise that the prevailing narrative on any media outlet for the shutdown is predicated largely on which side that particular outlet favors.

Breitbart, a reliably pro-Trump alt-media news site, has been pushing since before the shutdown a narrative that the Democrats are shutting down the government in an attempt to force government-paid healthcare for illegal aliens back into the budget. That narrative includes playing up Congressman Ro Khanna acknowledging that at least some of the healthcare spending that was being sought would benefit illegal aliens.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) admitted that the government shutdown fight is over Democrats seeking to provide free health care to illegal aliens — paid for by American taxpayers.

In an interview with Fox Business this week, Khanna said the government has shut down in part because Democrats are looking to make it easier for illegal aliens to secure taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits.

To be sure, Congressman Khanna did say that. Specifically, this is what he said:

In terms of the healthcare, the reality is they are just not being honest. The amount of money that actually is going towards people who are undocumented is such a small portion of the Medicaid cuts or the Affordable Care Act, if at all.

Townhall blasted out a headline on September 30 that Congresswoman Maxine Waters “admitted” the shutdown was going to happen because Democrats demanded healthcare for illegal aliens.

What she said specifically, in response to an interview question on the steps of the Capitol, was that “Democrats are demanding healthcare for everybody”.

While hardly a full-throated endorsement of the proposition that the government should fund healthcare for illegal aliens, Waters’ emphasis on “everybody” in her answer leaves illegal aliens (“undocumented migrants” in Democrat-speak) very much on the table, even as she is casting a wider net.

Writing here on Substack, AMuse illustrates the Democratic chicanery regarding healthcare spending that sidesteps the statutory barriers to illegal aliens receiving federal healthcare benefits.

Democrat’s latest Medicaid maneuver is not a policy choice, it is a scheme. Despite federal law explicitly barring Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants, Governors like Gavin Newsom and legislative Democrats have engineered a backdoor that effectively launders federal dollars into state programs that provide exactly that. This is not speculation, it is arithmetic. Spending on “Emergency Services for Undocumented Aliens” in California soared from $1.6 billion in 2023 to $6.4 billion in 2024, a leap so implausible that it collapses under scrutiny. Ordinary emergency care usually accounts for about 5% of total health costs, but California classified more than half of its immigrant expansion spending as emergencies. What was once a narrow federal carve-out for life-threatening crises has been transformed into a slush fund for routine care. The trick is in the paperwork. By reclassifying benefits, the state maximizes federal matching funds and frees up its own dollars for illegal coverage. Federal law is sidestepped, but taxpayers everywhere foot the bill.

While the funding demands of the Democrats might technically not explicitly provide healthcare benefits for illegal aliens, the track record of Democrat state governments makes a substantial argument that would be the net effect of those demands.

Corporate media, which has never been shy about tilting Democrat, has advanced an alternate narrative that the Democrats are defending Obamacare.

“What we will not do is support a partisan Republican spending bill that continues to gut the health care of the American people,” Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol. “This is a five-alarm fire in terms of the Republican caused health care crisis. And that’s why Democrats are determined to turn things around.”

NPR gave House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries an additional opportunity to push the healthcare narrative.

A presumptively non-partisan “fact-check” by Factually gives credence to elements of both narratives, calling the GOP attack on Democrats an “oversimplification”.

The core of the Democrats healthcare argument is that when Congress passed Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” over the summer, they failed to extend “enhanced premium tax credits” originally enacted in 2021 but slated to expire at the end of this year.

By the numbers, the impact of those tax credits expiring is not small, with nearly all Obamacare enrollees taking advantage of them.

More than 22 million people — about 92% of ACA enrollees — received a federal subsidy this year that reduced their insurance premiums, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group

Without those tax credits, Obamacare enrollees could see their healthcare premiums surge by as much as 75% on average, with some seeing their premiums more than double.

Yet the Democrats’ argument on Obamacare suffers from the same structural flaw as fiscal hawk arguments on spending advanced during the debate over the One Big Beautiful Bill, just moving in reverse.

"One Big Beautiful Bill" Is Already One Big Ugly Failure

If Medicaid is an inappropriate expenditure then no money should be spent on it. If Medicaid is appropriate then the money needed to deliver the requisite services should be allocated, and funding sources found.

Likewise, if the “Green New Deal” spending are appropriate government expenditures, they should be maintained. If they are not, there should not be even one dollar allocated.

Haggling over funding levels is simply the wrong argument to be made, whether from the Democrat or Republican perspective. Programs which are defensible should be fully funded. Programs which are not should not be funded.

That weakness in the Democrats’ narratives may prove fatal to their efforts to extract funding from the Republicans. With even corporate media outlets conceding that the Democrats are casting a wide net even on healthcare, Democrats lack a clear and cogent message on the shutdown.

Case in point: instead of focusing on just the Obamacare tax credits, they are pushing for a restoration of a number of Medicaid qualification criteria that were eliminated in the One Big Beautiful Bill, most of which benefit individuals whose provisional legal status has been revoked by the Administration and are now facing deportation.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act — passed by lawmakers and signed by President Trump over the summer — significantly restricted noncitizen eligibility for Medicaid coverage, making it only accessible to lawful permanent residents, Cubans and Haitians who entered the U.S. legally and noncitizens from several Pacific islands.

The bill excluded those granted parole to enter the U.S., refugees, asylees and the other previously eligible immigrants. Roughly 1.4 million immigrants could lose health insurance coverage under the bill’s provisions, according to a KFF analysis of Congressional Budget Office data.

The Democrats wide-ranging demands for ending the shutdown may play well to the Democratic voter base, but there is no escaping the capacity for those demands to be spun by the Republicans into “healthcare for illegal aliens”.

The span of Democrat demands exposes another vulnerability on the spending itself. The Republicans are already attacking that vulnerability with a secondary narrative on the shutdown: The Democrats spending demands would add $1.5 Trillion to the federal debt over the next decade.

The shock value of that number has been further magnified by the ever-quotable Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana running down the full laundry list of all the other spending the Democrats included besides the Obamacare tax credits.

Between “healthcare for illegal aliens” and “$1.5 Trillion added to the national debt,” the Democrats are facing an uphill battle to win the messaging war even within the friendly confines of corporate media. The Democratic base may approve of Democrat messaging on the shutdown, but independent voters, already more skeptical of partisan messaging, are likely to find the Democrats muddled messaging less compelling than the simple and linear messages from the Republicans.

Democrats Want To Fight. Do They Want To Win?

As with all partisan battles in the Congress, the government shutdown is not a battle over policy but over politics. Both sides are attempting to frame media narratives that will harm the other side heading into next year’s mid-term elections. Both sides are jockeying for political advantage.

With the Republicans having a razor-thin majority in the House, every bit of leverage counts, raising the stakes in every confrontation between the parties.

For his part, President Trump is not being shy about his intention to take this political fight to Democratic states. Between following through on threats to organize mass layoffs within the federal bureaucracy and targeting blue state programs for spending cuts and cancellations, Donald Trump is clear in his intention to grind on the Democrats as much as he possibly can.

That is a strategy that is cynical, even brutal, but it might also be a strategy that proves powerful and effective. Thus far there has not been the explosion of public backlash Democrats had hoped to see over Trump’s maneuvers. Even corporate media is failing to generate much of an emotional reaction over the shutdown.

While Democrats voters might be persuaded by the Democrat narratives, the Republican narratives will not be without effect among independent voters. Some independents will be swayed by the Democrats, some will not be swayed by either party, but some independents will be swayed by Republicans. At present, there is little indication that the independents swayed by Democrat messaging represent an outsized contingent of the independent voter bloc.

In order for the Democrats to bring any sort of political pressure to either the Republicans in Congress or the Trump Administration, they need to advance policies that have broad voter appeal—broader than what they have offered up thus far. They need to wrap those policies in messaging and framing that is broadly appealing.

When Democrat and CNN commentator Van Jones throws shade on the Democrats’ shutdown tactics, it is a fair bet the Democrats are not presenting policies with broad appeal in broadly appealing messaging and framing.

The Democrats are fighting, but without policies and messaging capable of resonating with more than the Democratic base, they are not fighting to win.

Do the Democrats understand this?

Do the Democrats want to win, or are they content merely to be seen “fighting”? Do they genuinely consider this a fight on substance or is this merely a performative “fight” on their part?

I do not pretend to have the answers, but regardless of the answers, the outcome for the shutdown is the same: the Democrats do not come out of this shutdown battle as winners.

We have yet to see how long before one side or the other does cave. Something may happen which tilts things in favor of the Democrats.

Short of such an extreme lucky break, however, I do not see how the shutdown can end even remotely well for the Democrats. Their position is weak. Their policies are all over the place. Their messaging is muddled.

Their tactical failures in this shutdown fight are so egregious the entire fight itself is just silly. It really is the “Silly Schumer Shutdown” and not just the “Schumer Shutdown.”

Instead of trying to merely fight Donald Trump and the Republicans, the Democrats would be well advised to think seriously about how they might beat Donald Trump and the Republicans.