The New Yorker:

Having the fight is the point. Winning it is a different matter.

By Jon Allsop

A few weeks ago, Ezra Klein, the influential liberal columnist at the Times, effectively called on Democrats to shut down the government, in an op-ed headlined “Stop Acting Like This Is Normal.” He looked back to March, when Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, rallied enough votes to help keep the government open ahead of a previous funding deadline; the Democratic base howled with rage, but Schumer argued that a shutdown risked weakening checks on President Donald Trump and further empowering Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to slash through federal agencies. Klein agreed that these were reasonable positions at the time, but now, he argued, times have changed. The existing curbs on Trump’s power look weak anyway, and his Presidency has moved out of its “muzzle-velocity” stage—a blitz of actions aimed at overwhelming opponents—and into a phase of “authoritarian consolidation” that Democrats can’t in good conscience sanction. A shutdown, Klein wrote, would turn the “diffuse crisis” of Trump’s corruption into an “acute crisis” that focusses popular attention—though the Party, he conceded, would need a strong message.

According to Puck, Klein’s argument drove frenzied discussion among Democrats in Congress, not all of whom were on board. (One House Democrat said, succinctly, “Fuck Ezra.”) Most agreed, however, that there would be a shutdown this fall, be it when government funding ran out, on September 30th, or following a temporary extension to that deadline, and that the only remaining question was whether the Party’s message would highlight Trump’s constitutional abuses—a crisis that must be addressed, for some; a sop to élite Times readers, for others—or a pocketbook issue such as health care. It soon became clear that Democrats planned to go to the mat on the latter, demanding a guaranteed extension of expiring Obamacare subsidies and a reversal of cuts to Medicaid and other health programs that Republicans passed in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer. They did push back on one of the aforementioned constitutional abuses, too: the Administration’s aggressive attempts to usurp congressional spending authority. Last week, Russell Vought, the chief architect of that effort, warned (or, perhaps, promised) that the Administration would use a shutdown to enact permanent cuts to the federal workforce. Democrats dismissed the threat on the somewhat contradictory ground that the Administration can’t legally follow through with it, and that it has already been firing workers anyway; Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, called Vought a “malignant political hack,” for good measure. Trump agreed to meet with Schumer and Jeffries, then cancelled, then agreed again. The meeting, on Monday, did not yield a deal. Afterward, Trump posted a foul A.I.-generated video depicting Jeffries with a sombrero and a mustache, alongside Schumer, who could be heard, in a fake voice, promising health care to “illegal aliens” who “can’t even speak English” and thus “won’t realize we’re just a bunch of woke pieces of shit.”

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