Democrats must stay on message with the shutdown

When the shutdown ends, the responsibility for the healthcare catastrophe will be clear.

Imagine if Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Democrats had caved on the spending deadline to prevent a shutdown and the threats of mayhem from President Donald Trump and his allies. Democrats would have been complicit in what would follow. The implementation of the massive cuts in Medicaid, even with many delayed until after the midterm elections, would have caused mayhem throughout the healthcare system, causing many hospitals, not just rural ones, to close and putting enormous stress on the other hospitals, especially in their emergency rooms. Massive increases in healthcare premiums for millions of Americans, starting Jan. 1, with the premium notices going out well before that. No ability to stop punitive rescissions, given that Senate Republican cultists would approve them all. And the right-wing wind machine would go into overtime to blame Democrats or at least to fuzz up culpability.

And, of course, Russell Vought’s radical Project 2025 agenda, to blow up as much of government as possible and fire as many civil servants as he can, would continue—not needing the excuse of a shutdown. In a shutdown, the law explicitly prevents government employees from being fired—but outside a shutdown, even with the civil service protections extant, six partisan Supreme Court justices would likely invoke their unitary executive doctrine and give Trump a free pass.

Republicans hold the levers of power, and Democrats are proclaiming from the rooftops that the reason is that Trump and his congressional allies are taking away Americans’ health care. If and when the shutdown ends—even if it has no deal behind it—the responsibility for the healthcare catastrophe will be clear.

Clear now, though, is that despite Trump’s bravado, the shutdown will not last much more than a month, and it won’t be just Democrats calling for it to end. Keep in mind that federal workers don’t get paid during a shutdown, even though the law now says explicitly that they will get back pay. Large numbers of federal employees, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the FBI, need their salaries to pay mortgages, rent, and other basic necessities. Getting loans and paying interest is not what they want to do. Before very long, they will push back. The last Trump shutdown ended because Transportation Security Administration agents and Federal Aviation Administration employees, frustrated at working long hours without pay, began calling in sick.

Preserving Affordable Care Act subsidies and ameliorating the damage from Medicaid cuts are necessary but not sufficient demands from Senate Democrats. There is an equally urgent need to block the bait-and-switch strategy of Trump and his congressional Republicans—reaching a bipartisan agreement on spending and then Trump taking away Democratic priorities with rescissions that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and his party accept. There should be an explicit ban against “pocket rescissions,” done with no opportunity for Congress to react. At minimum, Thune and at least three other Republican senators must agree that they will vote against rescissions that obviate their bipartisan spending deal.

Key to this now is message discipline and innovation by Democrats, two things sorely missing until now. The key message is simple: They want to take away your health care. We won’t let them. But it has to be repeated over and over, in every venue. House and Senate floors, during morning hours, sessions, and special orders at the end of the day. On every media outlet, including social media. On podcasts. In paid advertising. In press conferences and field hearings outside rural and urban hospitals, outside insurance companies, especially in Republican districts and red states. In town halls in Republican districts. The responsibility needs to be fixed with super glue where it belongs.

If all that is done, however the shutdown ends, Democrats will prevail—and ultimately, they will get rollbacks in the worst and most damaging cuts in health care and coverage.

Norman Ornstein is a political scientist, co-host of the podcast “Words Matter,” and author of books, including “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.”

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