In the fall, Democrats shut down the government for forty-three days—the longest such closure ever—prior to the emergence of a deal that funded most agencies through the end of January. As that new deadline approached, a longer-term settlement appeared to be coming together—but then federal immigration agents in Minnesota killed Alex Pretti, and Senate Democrats insisted that they would not funnel cash to the Department of Homeland Security without significant legal checks on its operations. This did lead to a second shutdown, although it lasted only a couple of days; Congress voted through a package that funded the bulk of the government, as planned, in addition to D.H.S., on a temporary basis, to allow two more weeks for negotiations. But those talks went nowhere, and on Valentine’s Day D.H.S. ran out of money. Ironically, this new, partial shutdown wouldn’t really curb immigration enforcement, which had received a durable cash injection from a spending bill last year. It did seem set to hamper uncontroversial agencies like the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration.
What followed was, as is often the case these days, a mix of the predictable, the strange, and the predictably strange. Talks about immigration-enforcement guardrails—such as barring agents from wearing masks, and putting an end to warrantless sweeps of private residences—did not reach a conclusion. Meanwhile, the white heat of attention on D.H.S. began to dissipate, not least after President Donald Trump went to war with Iran. In mid-March, one observer declared the shutdown “the quietest” in U.S. history; as of this past weekend, it was certainly the longest ever, exceeding the closure in the fall. By then, the noise about the shutdown had grown louder, as unpaid T.S.A. agents called in sick en masse, leading to huge lines at airports. Trump said that he would seek to pay T.S.A. salaries by executive fiat, inviting questions as to whether he could legally do that, and, if he could, why he didn’t do it earlier. Finally, late last week, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate agreed to a compromise—which Democrats had pushed for weeks—that would fund all of D.H.S. except for its immigration-enforcement arms. The G.O.P. alone would fund the latter through a separate budgetary process that isn’t susceptible to the filibuster, and therefore doesn’t require any Democratic support. The House of Representatives, however, torpedoed the agreement. Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly dismissed the Senate’s action as both a “crap sandwich” and a “joke.”
This teed up a further week of jockeying that was both no laughing matter and, at times, quite funny. Trump followed through on his T.S.A.-pay pledge, easing the airport chaos. Meanwhile, many members of Congress skipped town, amid growing public opprobrium that, perhaps, crystallized most visibly in the gossip rag TMZ, which has gone full Woodward and Bernstein, running photos of lawmakers in the line of anything but duty. (The Republican Senator Lindsey Graham was papped at Disney World holding a bubble wand.) On Wednesday, Johnson consented to the initial Senate plan after all; what had been a crap sandwich was now, apparently, a tasty process on “two parallel” slices of bread. The Senate dispensed with the legislation funding the non-immigration portions of D.H.S. on Thursday, but the House punted, and members from across the ideological spectrum of the Republican caucus are reputedly furious with Johnson for trying to force them to eat shit. It’s still unclear when—and how—the bill might pass. Trump, for his part, has said that he wants the other bill, the one funding immigration enforcement, on his desk by June 1st. Amid the continuing impasse, he also said that he would sign an order paying all unpaid D.H.S. staffers, not just those at the T.S.A.
Republicans, thanks to their recent intercameral sniping, have already succeeded in making the slow dénouement of the D.H.S. shutdown squarely about them, at least in the élite media. (TMZ’s coverage has had more of a “plague on both your houses” flavor.) Since it was the Democrats who initially forced the shutdown, however—and in light of the liberal psychodrama that has engulfed the Party’s use (or not) of such tactics, dating back more than a year now—it’s worth pausing to ask what they have gained from it. If Party bigwigs were accused of caving after the shutdown in the fall ended without concessions on the policy objectives they had sought—in that case, the extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies—did they not also cave this time? Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, who was widely blamed for the health-care capitulation despite personally having voted against it, insisted the opposite. “Senate Democrats never wavered,” he said. “We were clear from the start: Fund critical security, protect Americans, and no blank check for reckless ICE and border patrol enforcement.” More surprisingly, this time, at least some liberal pundits and progressive groups broadly agreed.
Since January, there have been changes at D.H.S. Immigration officials announced a drawdown in Minnesota; there has also been turnover among top personnel, including Kristi Noem, the D.H.S. Secretary, who was fired—sorry, moved into the very real job of Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas—and replaced by Senator Markwayne Mullin, who, at his confirmation hearing, promised to tone things down. (Only in Trump’s Washington can a former M.M.A. fighter be considered the deëscalatory option.) But the shutdown didn’t really create the pressure that caused these developments—if anything, public blowback following the killings of Pretti and others led to these developments and to the shutdown. In Noem’s case, the straw that broke the camel’s—or should that be horse’s?—back seems to have been her commission of a cardinal Trumpworld sin: making herself the center of attention by starring in a high-budget, cowboy-coded P.R. flick. And, beyond rhetoric, it’s not clear that Trump’s deportation policy has meaningfully, lastingly changed.
Back in January, Democrats were not willing to accept changes to optics alone, instead demanding concrete legal reforms to rein in agents’ perceived brutality. The current provisional deal does not contain those demands. Sure, Republicans are already starting to resemble Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes as they try to pass the deal and legislate more funding unilaterally—they have a razor-thin majority in the House, where angry hard-liners hold great sway and any party-line bill could be hampered by the push and pull of certain members raising concerns about budgetary largesse and others trying to lard up on other priorities—and this will be good for Democrats politically. But, if or when Republicans pass a bill, it will ultimately be on their own terms. Schumer’s defiant remarks could come to resemble a different “Simpsons” meme, involving the hack lawyer Lionel Hutz repunctuating an ad for his services: “Senate Democrats never wavered? No! Blank check for reckless ICE and border-patrol enforcement!”
I predicted, in January, that if Democrats failed to secure significant concessions, with Republicans on the back foot, the backlash would be fierce. Apparently, I was wrong about that; prior critics of Schumer et al. seem mollified by the idea that Democrats showed fight, and kept their hands clean. In January, I also wrote that, as instruments of leverage for a minority party, shutdowns are not cost-free magic wands. (They might be more like bubble wands: diverting for a bit but risky to hold on to for too long.) Democrats must work within a disorienting universe in which policymakers sometimes seem bound by the normal rules of political gravity—Republicans did begin to back off Trump’s mass-deportation campaign after its tactics became unpopular—and other times just do whatever they want. In the fall, I argued that Democrats were unfairly thrashed for failing to secure health-care concessions that were not immediately attainable. This time, I felt that they might have had enough leverage to impose potentially life-saving accountability on D.H.S., even if a compromise that involved any funding at all for immigration enforcement would surely have been unpalatable to sections of the base. Democrats were not avoiding blame for the airport lines—like TMZ, voters appeared to be poxing both houses—but, in the zero-sum Beltway game, they didn’t seem to be losing in the court of public opinion; Republicans, if anything, were being blamed slightly more. Maybe a partial shutdown was never going to be enough. Maybe the gravity of the killings in Minnesota justified taking the whole government hostage all along.
Doing that might have forced a quicker resolution, by concentrating public attention. Democrats’ fall shutdown, I and others argued, was primarily about attention as an end in itself—a means of focussing outrage over Trump’s many diffuse scandals by contriving a unified crisis point on health care, a reliably good issue for Democrats. I think it broadly worked, forcing a longer-term debate on the subsidies, and contributing (at least as Trump saw it) to poor Republican returns in off-year elections. What has unfolded during the D.H.S shutdown has shown that harnessing attention, even when it shouldn’t be the primary goal, is an essential precondition of change—and that, in the Trump era, half measures lead most to look away. I found something that Mullin said in his confirmation hearing to be revealing, if, perhaps, accidentally so: that his six-month goal is for his agency not to be “the lead story every single day.” One way to achieve that is to change your behavior. Another is to rely on people being consumed by something else. ♦
