Congress has a deadline of March 14 to pass spending bills to keep the federal government open. This poses a political challenge for both the Republican majority and Democratic minority.
Government shutdowns are proven political losers for the party perceived to be at fault for closing national parks and suspending military pay. The GOP usually gets the blame because it has a faction of nihilists who make unrealistic demands and eagerly welcome the shuttering of the federal government. During the first administration of Donald Trump, one of those nihilists was Donald Trump, who instigated an unpopular 35-day shutdown. With Republicans now holding a wafer-thin 218-215 majority (with two GOP stronghold seats in Florida vacant until April 1), the widely held assumption is Republicans can’t move the needed spending bill package without help from Democrats. By definition, Democrats have leverage.
Yet that leverage is not unlimited. If Democrats were to issue demands that Republicans would never swallow and the public deemed unreasonable, they could wrest defeat from the jaws of victory.
This means that Democrats have a political challenge of their own. Passive-aggressively encouraging a shutdown by refusing to cooperate in good faith risks shouldering the blame for any economic damage that follows.
But Trump claims that he isn’t bound by the Constitution’s granting of power of Congress to appropriate funds or the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which establishes the process—requiring congressional approval—for when a president wants to withhold congressional appropriations. This raises the question of whether Trump would honor any congressional compromise on spending and whether Democrats should bother taking any political risk on a compromise the president would unconstitutionally and illegally ignore.
In turn, the first demand from Democrats should be that the legislative text explicitly state that the executive branch “shall” spend all appropriated funds within a specific timeframe.
This will protect the legislation from any shenanigans by Trump and his bureaucratic goon Elon Musk. No Constitutional interpretation would be required by the judiciary to conclude that the executive branch is obligated to spend every penny in the bill. If the president ignores the law’s plain text, only a completely supine Supreme Court would side with him. And if that’s where we are, we have bigger problems than just ensuring all the money appropriated for the second half of Fiscal Year 2025 gets spent.
Democrats should also insist that existing funding levels are maintained for the remainder of the fiscal year. Republicans are determined to take a machete to the budget, but they have another legislative vehicle: the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process. Democrats can say to Republicans: If you want to cut the budget, and you think voters will appreciate those cuts, then do it yourself and reap the rewards. Democrats are not obligated to help.
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries understandably started off with a higher bid, as detailed in a letter to his colleagues two weeks ago: “I have made clear to House Republican leadership that any effort to steal taxpayer money from the American people, end Medicaid as we know it or defund programs important to everyday Americans, as contemplated by the illegal White House Office of Management and Budget order, must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill, if not sooner.”
Again, Democrats should insist that money appropriated by Congress in the bill actually gets spent. Otherwise the bill isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. But making additional demands—such as forcing Republicans to shelve plans for Medicaid cuts in budget reconciliation—under threat of government shutdown is known political dead end. Sure, Medicaid is popular, and Democrats are poised to reap political rewards if Republicans follow through with their cuts. But in past shutdown dramas, Republicans have repeatedly made the mistake of telling themselves that since their demand is popular in a vacuum, the public will reward them for taking the government hostage in service of that demand. Every time Republicans tried that play, the public turned on them, and they ended up caving.
A simpler, straightforward demand that the spending bill maintains current funding levels and requires the President to spend the money is less likely to end with a Democratic cave. Already, Republicans, feeling the burden of holding the majority, appear prepared to accept that the bill won’t involve cuts. Politico reported on Friday that “GOP leaders are now privately considering a continuing resolution to fund the government at current levels through the end of the fiscal year, along with wildfire aid and other provisions, according to a person familiar with the matter who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.”
Republican leaders are probably willing to skip any cuts in a bill that funds the government for the next six months. The massive reductions they want over a longer timeframe can come soon enough through a partisan reconciliation bill. However, the reconciliation process will likely require overcoming considerable intra-party infighting. Recall when a fractured GOP in 2017 failed to pass a reconciliation bill that repealed the Affordable Care Act and when Democrats couldn’t bring along Joe Manchin on their multi-faceted “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill.
Tensions within the Republican Party are already bubbling up about the extreme cuts that are in the queue. “It’s far from clear that House Republicans will be unified once the budget resolution hits the floor,” reports Roll Call, because “conservatives have expressed concern about raising the debt limit by $4 trillion, as the resolution would allow, while centrists in the party were already chafing at the proposal’s spending cuts” which include “cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as food stamps, as well as benefits relied on by veterans and seniors.”
Democrats will be in a great position to exploit such Republican infighting, as well as trash any final reconciliation bill once the infighting is resolved, if they don’t stumble into a government shutdown with excess demands, turning the political spotlight away from Republican shenanigans and, instead, burning themselves.
