Oct.22

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Federal Government Shutdown Enters Week 4

As of yesterday, the current shutdown is the silver medalist, having pushed the 21-day shutdown of the Bill Clinton presidency into third place. And now, it's onward and upward to the record! (Cue the theme from Chariots of Fire.)

On Monday, the Senate considered a continuing resolution (CR), one that would fund the government short-term, for the 11th time, and failed to pass a CR for the 11th time. The headline that virtually every outlet went with was some variation of "Democrats block bill to end government shutdown for 11th time" (see here, here, here and here for examples). That framing seems a little leading to us; either side could have taken steps to advance the bill, and neither chose to do so.

At the moment, there is no meaningful negotiating going on. Or, if there is, it's not being made public. There is, however, a lot of energy being expended in the White House on trying to pay for certain key things without a budget. Federal employees have paydays coming up, and Trump does not want some of them to start staging sickouts if they don't get paid. In particular, the administration is trying to find a way to keep air traffic controllers on the payroll. There's also some attention being paid to farmers, to the next round of military paychecks and to WIC.

What Trump would very much like to do is use the money collected from tariffs—reportedly $200 billion so far—as a slush fund to pay for whatever he thinks is worth paying for. The problem—to clarify what we wrote earlier this week—is that the tariff funds go into the U.S. Treasury, and Trump can't legally spend the money without Congressional approval. It could hardly be otherwise; if a president had personal control over tariff revenues, then any and all presidents could use tariffs to create a presidential piggy bank to be utilized as they see fit, with virtually no oversight.

Trump is often willing to say "Congress be damned," and to do whatever he wants, of course. However, his underlings would have to play along, and some of them might not be so eager to break the law. Another issue is that even if Trump taps into the tariff money, $200 billion will only go so far, and the time will come fairly soon that it won't be enough to cover all the expenditures that the White House wants to cover.

Congress, for its part, is wrestling with a couple of things right now. First, the CR was meant to buy them 7 weeks to work out a real budget; nearly half of that 7 weeks has already been used up, with no real end in sight. So, even if a deal is worked out to pass the CR, a new one will be needed, one that once again opens up a 6-7 week window. In addition, the two parties are working out different plans for paying federal employees, including military personnel, during the shutdown. The details aren't completely ironed out yet, but the executive summary is that the Democrats want to pay everyone, while the Republicans want to pay only selected people (soldiers and air traffic controllers, mostly).

As we have written many times, this is only going to end when one side or the other thinks they have the weaker hand, and wants to stop the bleeding before it gets worse. There have been two new major polls in the last week, and they report the same result as the last several weeks' worth of polls: The Democrats have the stronger hand here. The newest from Reuters/Ipsos says that 50% of respondents assign more blame to the Republicans, while 43% assign more blame to the Democrats. And the newest from CNBC says that it's 53% who place more blame on the Republicans against only 37% who blame the Democrats. The latter poll also has a cross-tab that should be scary for the GOP: Independent voters blame the Republicans by a margin of almost 3-to-1, 58% to 21%.

The fact that the White House is scrambling to plug the holes in the dike is also pretty good evidence that the Republicans have the weaker hand, and that the administration knows it. After all, from a purely political vantage point, if it's the other side's numbers that are sinking, you should let that process play out. And if there's ever been an administration that would think strictly along those lines, it's this one. Clearly, Trump & Co. think that if air traffic controllers walk off the job, or farmers lose some crops to spoilage, or poor kids go without food, the Republicans will get more of the blame than the Democrats.

There are other indications of weakening resolve on the red side of the aisle. A group of 13 moderate Republican House members just sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), informing him that even if he does not negotiate an extension to the Obamacare subsidies before the shutdown ends, he better be ready to do that the moment the government re-opens. Those 13, and some of their colleagues, are already preparing for those discussions. In addition, several Republican senators have communicated to the White House that they do not like the Russell Vought-engineered plan to punish blue states, as Republican voters will get caught up in the damage, too.

The Democrats, by contrast, appear to be sticking together. And, according to reporting from The Hill, the blue team is motivated to keep holding the line because... they are scared witless the base will rebel if they do not. One unnamed Democratic senator said that "People are going to get hammered" if they vote to reopen the government without getting anything in return, while another used the term "guillotined." So, it would seem the pooh-bahs have taken note of what the rank and file is thinking.

On Monday, we launched a poll to gauge readers' assessment of the shutdown. We intended to publish all the results today, but we got thousands of responses, and a lot of good comments. We want time to go through them and do this properly. So, for now, we'll do a preview; the results produced by the first question. Here's when the readership thinks this is likely to finally end:

The overwhelming consensus is that we've got at least a couple of weeks to work with here. We think that's on the mark. (Z)