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When Marry Harris got Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall on the phone on Sunday, she had one simple question for him: Do you think the government should be open right now?
His answer was no—that Senate Democrats should have taken a stand against Donald Trump’s lawlessness and withheld the votes Republicans needed to keep the government from shutting down. Even one single Democrat could have made more of a stink and slowed things down.
Now, for better or worse, the government is open—but the struggle within the party over how to handle a potential shutdown revealed divisions that may be with us for quite some time. On Monday’s episode of What Next, Harris spoke with Marshall about the mindset that led Democrats to give up a rare moment of leverage.
Here’s their conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Tell me what happened in the House, where this legislation began. We have this GOP-crafted bill. Democrats weren’t consulted on any of it, basically.
Yeah, by design, they weren’t consulted on it. There was some initial negotiation. And Democrats basically said, look, if we are going to pass this kind of mini stopgap budget bill, we need some assurances that Donald Trump is not going to turn around and just cut the budget after we pass it. Mike Johnson realized that was a total nonstarter for Donald Trump to put any limitations on his power, so they just said: Fine, we’re just going to do this ourselves. And they included a number of additional things that, under normal circumstances, would be poison pills for the Democrats.
Is this stuff like slashing Washington, D.C.’s budget, things like that?
Slashing Washington, D.C.’s budget. It added a lot of additional spending for things Republican support. Cuts for things that Democrats support. There’s sort of too many things to get into.
But just as one example: Everybody knows that Donald Trump is imposing tariffs, un-imposing them, imposing bigger ones the next day. We’ve been doing this for the last month with these tariffs. Some people, because of that, get the idea that tariffs are like a pardon—one of these things that are just in the president’s power, the Constitution gives him that power.
Tariffs are not like that at all. The president has no power over tariffs whatsoever. But there is standing legislation that has been in place for decades that basically gives presidents this power. And so in this bill, they put in additional language that takes away some of Congress’ very, very limited power under current law to say no to some of these tariffs.
So this is not what’s called, usually, a “clean CR,” where it’s just, we’re saying: We’re going to do what we said we’d do for a few months and come back and talk about it later. This is: Let’s give a lot more power to Donald Trump, but say that we’re just doing it as a funding bill. Is that a fair assessment?
Exactly. It’s nowhere near clean. A “clean CR”—a little code word they use for these kinds of bills—is one sentence. And this was like a 100-page bill. So yeah, it was not even close to being just a continuation.
So Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democrats in the House, got a lot of his Democrats to vote against this bill, including Democrats in swing districts who were pretty vulnerable. It goes along to the Senate. Was he expecting the Senate would stand up here? Was there an agreement here?
How it is being presented now—how a lot of House Democrats are presenting this—is kind of what you’re getting at: That they went out on a limb and then the Senate didn’t back them up. I think that’s part of the story. I’m not sure it’s completely the story.
There’s an expectation, but maybe not an agreement.
I think they were all caught off guard by being here. And I think the House decided to hold the line, and then it’s going to go to the Senate and we’ll see what happens there.
The House is notably a much more vulnerable constituency of lawmakers. These are people who are up for election every two years. Unlike the Senate.
Precisely. And I think that the key thing here is that neither House nor Senate Democrats had laid the groundwork, if this was going to be a fight. And that was something that a lot of people were telling them to do. Like basically, a month ago, you need to be saying: You’re doing all this illegal cutting. You think you can do it now, but we say no—and look at that deadline coming up, we’re doing it for X, Y, and Z. But they didn’t do that. And they had a sort of explanation why they didn’t do that, but they didn’t. And the Senate Democrats were especially caught flat-footed because they were figuring it wouldn’t get out of the House. And there were some good reasons to think it wasn’t going to get out of the House.
But you’ve gotta be prepared when the ball comes to you, my friend.
It is insane that they hadn’t seriously thought through what they would do if it did get through the House.
So this legislation reaches the Senate. We have this weird week where you have, first, Schumer being like, We’re not going to do it. And then it’s clear: Eh, maybe we’re going to do this, help the Republicans out here. And it all comes to a head on Friday, which is when this thing has to get done or the government will shut down.
What surprised you as these votes started to come in? I think people suspected that this CR was going to get passed by the Senate—but then we had people like Hawaii’s Brian Schatz voting for this CR, and that surprised me. He’s been outspoken about using these spending fights as points of leverage because the Democrats need to show that we’re fighting right now. And that’s not what he did here.
Yeah, he is sort of the biggest mystery. I was greatly surprised by that, for exactly the reasons you’re saying, and I still have not seen a clear explanation of why he did it. He’s a fairly progressive senator. He’s definitely someone who he spends time in the online political spaces, he sort of speaks that language. A number of the senators who voted yes were either people who are retiring or people who are extremely close to the leadership. Gillibrand obviously is the junior senator from New York, so she’s kind of always going to take Chuck Schumer’s lead. Basically almost everybody who voted yes has a similar kind of profile in the Senate, and Schatz was the big exception.
Can we take seriously the arguments Democrats were making against shutting down the government and for this continuing resolution? Because Chuck Schumer did try to explain his logic here. He mostly seemed to be saying: If we shut the government down, Donald Trump is going to have power to control spending, for whatever money is left. He could just start shutting all sorts of things down willy-nilly, which would be incredibly damaging. Is that the main argument here?
I think there’s two arguments. One is that you shut the government down and the Democrats will get the blame for it—a political argument. And the other is that, as bad as things are right now, you’re just sort of handing him a blank check. I think those two arguments were real arguments. I don’t think they were good arguments.
But there’s an additional factor, which is: What is the argument that we were actually going to get something from it? And if you take each of those premises—like we could be damaged politically, the government could be damaged more than it already is being damaged, and there’s no way we can actually gain anything—well, again, if you buy those premises, then that’s not a bad argument altogether. I don’t think that the people who wanted to do this were lying. I think that characterologically, they weren’t in a mood to fight.
Yeah, because I think you could take the same set of facts and you could make a different argument, which is an argument I’d call an accelerationist argument. Essentially that, yes, Trump and Elon Musk may do worse things during this shutdown, but that will make clear to a broader swath of Americans exactly the project that they are trying to complete here, sooner. And that will make it easier for us to argue against them and control them more quickly. Now, you’re playing with fire—there’s a reason it’s called an accelerationist argument, right? But I think it’s a real argument that you need to reckon with.
Yeah, and I think it is actually the correct argument. I wouldn’t put it in precisely accelerationist terms. How I would put it is: In terms of the idea that they can just do anything they want and they can do even more—it’s not entirely clear that is actually factually true, inasmuch as that they’re kind of already doing everything they want. But public opinion remains a backstop to that. And one of my kind of global arguments would be that the people who did not want to fight about this are very over-literal about things.
What do you mean by that?
I think that much of national politics is not about specific events or policies. It’s about a series of contests of performative power. It’s sort of like, if anybody is familiar with opera, there’s the libretto and there’s the score. The libretto is the policy stuff, and these little ins and outs about cloture and stuff. And the libretto, you know—I’m gonna bum out libretto fans—the libretto is not really what opera is about. It’s the score. That is the emotional content and the real driving force of opera. And the score in this case is, again, these performative displays of power. And if you have situations where the underdogs—let’s call them that—if the one opening they have to fight, they don’t fight, that shapes everybody’s perceptions of everything.
Like whether they even can fight.
Yes, exactly.
So you’re saying your job, if you’re a politician, is to tell people they can fight, they have a voice.
And that your fighting can shape outcomes. Even if the details are hard to see.
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