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When President Donald Trump announced Friday he was unilaterally cancelling $5 billion of foreign aid funding, he was making good on his America First policy promises. But he was also picking a fight that’s been months in the making.
Democrats immediately decried the White House power grab — what’s known in Hillspeak as a “pocket rescission” — calling it an illegal usurpation of the congressional spending powers. They spent weeks warning that any such move would jeopardize needed Democratic votes to avoid a shutdown at the end of September.
Trump did it anyway. Now Democrats — eager to show the base that they’re taking the fight to the president — will almost certainly take the bait, making the prospects of a shutdown extremely high this fall.
The fighting posture will no doubt be welcomed by the party base, which has skewered congressional leaders for not taking a hard enough line against Trump. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in particular saw major blowback in March when he moved to pass a GOP funding bill at a time when most Democrats said the party should hold the line against Trump.
But the difficult reality for Democrats is that the same reasons Schumer gave for avoiding a shutdown back then also apply now: Typically the party that makes the demand that leads to a shutdown is the party that shoulders the public blame. More importantly, a shutdown could give Trump and his sharp-elbowed budget director, Russ Vought, even more authority to slash away at the federal bureaucracy.
“We would essentially be handing him even more power,” one Senate Democratic aide told me this week. “And who knows when they'll reopen the government? They don't even care about the government being open.”
There’s also the question of how Democrats would get out of such a scenario. As trash piles up in national parks and other government services are put on hold, Republicans will likely make Democrats vote over and over again to keep the government shuttered — all while the White House blames them for thousands of employees going without pay. Many Hill Republicans, meanwhile, would be glad to let the government stay closed.
“You'll probably just have to eventually fold and get nothing out of it,” the aide said, warning the scenario posed huge risks for the party: “Are we going to let the base dictate legislative strategy and just shut down the government so we can say, ‘Okay, at least we fought,’ and then two weeks later, we reopen it and get nothing in return, and in the interim do harm to actual people?”
Sensing the predicament, the White House is leaning into this fight. A senior administration official on Friday said they plan to dare Democrats to refuse to put up the votes for their latest plan: a so-called “clean” stopgap extending current funding levels to some unspecified time. And while the official insisted the administration doesn’t want a shutdown, Friday’s funding cancellation move was unquestionably a thumb in the eye of Democrats who have been crystal clear that these sorts of actions would make it difficult to do business.
As Democrats decry Trump’s appropriations power play, we should be pretty clear about one thing: Even before Friday’s announcement, many were agitating for a shutdown showdown re-do after the party surrendered to traditional bipartisanship last March. I’ve heard some Democrats privately predict that leader Schumer couldn’t survive politically if he were to make a deal with Trump again — though others firmly disagree.
There certainly appears to be a shift in strategy at the very top: Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have adopted a more pugnacious stance on government funding this time around. Over the recess, the leaders suggested in letters that they may demand Republicans roll back their Medicaid cuts in Trump’s megabill — something that is never going to happen, given those reductions are a signature part of Trump’s legislative agenda. (Think 2013 shutdown, Ted Cruz and Obamacare.)
One senior Democratic official who agreed with Schumer’s decision to avoid a shutdown in March made the case to me that the environment is now different. Trump is no longer the newly minted president. His approval numbers have softened. And his biggest legislative accomplishments and recent power grabs are unpopular with voters.
That means Democratic senators should feel more confident than before that they can pin the blame on Trump and the GOP, this person said: “At worst, both sides get the blame 50/50.”
The hope for Democrats would be that a long government shutdown forces Trump to the table and that unhappy voters would put pressure on both sides to cut a deal. But that could be wishful thinking given Trump’s well-known stomach for a fight.
He might also recall that Schumer and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi were rewarded handsomely for refusing to negotiate during the longest shutdown fight in history, in 2018. They didn’t give an inch on Trump’s demands for border wall money — and he caved without getting a penny.
Democrats’ best hope will be that the Republican Party itself splinters on government funding. What made the March standoff a big GOP win, after all, is that Republicans managed to unite behind a plan in the House and pass a full-year continuing resolution without Democratic votes.
It’s not clear there will be that kind of unity this time. For instance, Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) unambiguously decried Trump’s pocket rescission Friday, calling the move “unlawful.”
I’ve also heard from House appropriators who feel insulted by the continued use of CRs and furious over the pocket rescission. One suggested to me that appropriators could unite to protect their authority and deny leadership the votes they need to jam the Democrats.
But we’ve heard this story before: Centrist Republicans are great at squawking, lousy at standing their ground — particularly when Trump cracks the whip.
So in the end, the fate of a shutdown will come down to Schumer. And this time around, Democrats predict — and I believe they’re right — he may conclude he has to be on the other side of this fight.
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