Government Shutdown Fight in Full Swing as Deadline Nears

Henrietta Treyz, co-founder at Veda Partners, discusses the state of the Democratic party, redistricting, and the chances of avoiding a government shutdown in the coming week.

With about a week and a half left before the next fiscal year begins, don’t hold your breath on anything happening soon to avoid a government shutdown.

President Donald Trump’s latest comments about negotiating with Democrats are a reminder of the difference between a get-together and getting together. “I’d love to meet with them, but I don’t think it’s going to have any impact,” Trump told reporters over the weekend. “They want all this stuff, they haven’t changed, they haven’t learned from the biggest beating they’ve ever taken, just about.”

One of the minority party’s key demands is to make sure Obamacare premiums don’t suddenly spike. They want to add that language to a stopgap spending measure.

The House and Senate both are off this week, with senators scheduled to return on Sept. 29, just ahead of the government shutdown deadline, and representatives back on Oct. 7, well into the new fiscal year.

When Ted Cruz’s strategy to defund the Affordable Care Act led to an epic government shutdown fight a dozen years ago, Democrats excoriated him as a villain. Now, they’ve adopted the same tactic, though with the opposite goal — preserving Affordable Care Act and other health-care subsidies.

Back then, the Texas Republican was the major force behind the failed effort to eliminate funding for the ACA, at one point giving a 21-hour speech that included a reading of “Green Eggs and Ham.” House and Senate Republican leaders later confessed they thought the freshman firebrand’s strategy was dumb, with no clear endgame, but they went along with it anyway. (Then-Speaker John Boehner, a fellow Republican, would later call Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.”)

The shutdown ended after 16 days when Republicans agreed to reopen the government — over Cruz’s objections — without getting anything in return.

President Barack Obama then, like Donald Trump now, refused to negotiate to keep the government open. Meanwhile Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer is faulting Republicans for the looming shutdown because GOP leaders aren’t negotiating with him — the exact complaint Republicans had about Democrats 12 years ago.

While the tactics are the same, Schumer insisted Friday the fights themselves are very different — and that the public is on their side.

“They were taking something away. We’re trying to restore something that they took away,” he said. “It’s a world of difference.”

Democrats want to extend ACA subsidies that were increased under President Joe Biden and restore spending Republicans cut this year from Medicaid. Millions are expected to lose health insurance or see far higher premiums after those cuts take effect.

Asked Friday about the 2013 shutdown, Senate Majority Leader John Thune noted Democratic senators at the time argued a stopgap spending bill was not the place to debate major health-care policy.

“The shoe is on the other foot now, and they are trying to use what they think is leverage to get a bunch of stuff done that is never going to happen,” Thune said.

Thune contended the Democrats’ offer, which would have cost more than $1 trillion, was a “cold-blooded, partisan political attempt to try and score political points with a left-wing base,” he said.

A shutdown is still days away and far from certain. After all, no one on Capitol Hill caves 10 days before a deadline.

There are always last-minute ways to avert a shutdown, if both parties and Trump are willing to take them. Those could include a shorter time frame for stopgap spending, bipartisan sweeteners, or handshake agreements for future action.

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