Republicans Can End the Government Shutdown Today

The longest federal government shutdown in American history is 35 days, spanning December 2018 and January 2019. Technically, it was a partial shutdown because appropriations for some agencies were approved before the beginning of Fiscal Year 2019. It is also the only government shutdown directly instigated by a President of the United States, one Donald J. Trump, who wanted to hold the government hostage until Congress agreed to give him billions for building a border wall.

Since then, America has had 2,440 days of fully operating federal governance. (Joe Biden pitched a perfect game.) Trump is back, and the streak has ended. With zero Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations bills passed by Congress, this shutdown is total, save for essential employees.

My bet is that this shutdown will break the 35-day record, with no partial shutdown asterisks.

Why? Because Trump doesn’t care if the government shuts down. He has no interest in what most of the federal government does, beyond what it can do for him. Through the Office of Management and Budget, he has the power to deem certain government workers essential, which fulfills his desire to exert unilateral power.

Democrats, all things being equal, do care about what the federal government does. But Trump is already stripping the civil service down to the studs while asserting unlimited executive powers. Democrats, for the most part, do not want to abet Trump’s agenda with passive votes for Republican spending bills, nor are they afraid of taking blame for any of the consequences of a shutdown.

Perhaps they should be. I have already expressed my disagreements with the tactical choices by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. But Trump begins this standoff with much of the public aghast at his chaotic authoritarianism; a new New York Times poll shows majorities believe Trump has “gone too far” by pressuring media outlets, sending the National Guard into cities, and with immigration enforcement generally. Trump has been such a colossal chaos agent and has been so dismissive of bipartisan negotiations that Democrats have reason to believe he won’t escape blame for one more act of chaos, even though Democrats have complicated their preferred narrative by making their own demands regarding renewal of expiring health coverage subsidies.

Moreover, Democratic Party favorability is already pretty low, just 33 percent in the Real Clear Politics average. A shutdown probably can’t make it go much lower and could give it a slight boost if frustrated rank-and-file Democrats are energized. Having said that, the poll number Democrats will want to keep a closer eye on is the generic congressional ballot, where they now hold a slight edge. Slippage there in reaction to a shutdown may prompt calls for surrender. Short of that, Democrats should have no problem allowing the federal government to stay closed and pinning the resulting chaos on the person tagged as the “Chaos President” before he even held the office.

Might Schumer wobble? Some Democrats were frustrated when he shied away from the shutdown standoff in March. And Punchbowl News’s Andrew Desiderio reported on Monday that “Schumer has approached a small group of Senate Dems to see if they’re OK with short-term [spending bill] (10 days, for example), but with a caveat—assuming Trump agrees to a negotiation on [Affordable Care Act] subsidies.” Punchbowl subsequently reported that the small olive branch “drew the ire of House Democrats.” Schumer didn’t propose it when he met with Trump.

Just as rank-and-file Democrats are pressuring Schumer to walk away from the negotiating table, Trump is doing everything possible to push him away. Following that meeting, Trump posted on his social media page a deepfake video of Schumer telling a sombrero-clad Jeffries, over a track of mariachi music, “we have no voters anymore because of our woke trans bullshit” so “if we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.” Republicans had some ground to stand on in arguing Democrats were instigating the shutdown by insisting on renewing expiring health coverage subsidies. Still, they sacrificed that ground by lying about what Democrats were demanding. Beyond the substantive dishonesty, attempting to humiliate Schumer only gives him a political incentive to stand his ground.

And so does Trump, spending precious time, as the shutdown clock ticks, telling military leaders to expect deployment to American cities to fight a “war from within” in apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

Furthermore, Democrats have an available response to Republican attempts to shift all the blame onto them: Republicans don’t need us to open the government. They can change Senate rules and suspend or eliminate the filibuster on a party-line vote. And Republicans can’t argue that they think changing the rules on a party-line vote—the so-called “nuclear option”—is a terrible violation of Senate norms because Republicans literally changed the rules on a party-line vote three weeks ago to speed confirmation of judicial nominees. If they don’t go nuclear and kill the filibuster to keep the government open, that shows how little they care about keeping it open, and how much they care about creating excuses for vilifying Democrats.

(Longtime readers of my work know I like the filibuster, so I have no ulterior motive in goading Republicans into abolishing it. But let’s get real: Senators in both parties have gone “nuclear” enough that the filibuster rule is already hanging by a thread.)

All this is to say that we shouldn’t expect a shutdown to end anytime soon, primarily because Trump is a reckless authoritarian with no obvious interest in negotiations or in maintaining the bulk of what the federal government does, and far more interested in scurrilous political combat.

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