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The phones in Democratic offices on Capitol Hill have been ringing off the hook. As President Donald Trump and his revolutionaries blitz through the federal government at a speed unprecedented in recent times, Democratic constituents are pleading with their representatives to do something about it all.
What can Democrats do to push back against Trump? Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sorts their efforts into several buckets: oversight, litigation, communication and mobilization, and legislation. The first several fronts, between the regular petitions for temporary restraining orders, press conferences, protests outside government buildings, or drawing out votes on nominees, have been daily efforts. It’s that last tool of pushback—their votes in Congress—that won’t really be deployed until mid-March.
Funding for the government expires March 14. Republicans will need Democratic votes to keep the government open. They’ll need Democratic votes in the Senate to surmount the 60-vote filibuster threshold, and they’ll need Democratic votes in the House, where the narrow Republican majority is a mess.
In theory, then, the deadline will give Democrats their first leverage point to put some brakes on the executive branch. But it’s easy to overestimate and overstate the extent of their leverage, and it’s a hand they can overplay. Neither this funding fight nor the next one is going to be the moment they turn the tide against the Trump administration. That was, is, and will remain a slog.
Bipartisan spending deals are always difficult to negotiate. Adding a new layer of complication to this next round is that Democrats can’t be sure the Trump administration will spend the hard-earned dollars Democrats negotiate in a deal. It’s not just that the administration’s actions so far make the negotiations themselves, or the lack thereof, an unusually theoretical exercise. They also give Democrats, whose base is livid, less political space to work with Republicans at all.
Republicans in Congress are still a long way from asking Democrats what they need, and Democrats a long way from formalizing their ask. But Democratic leaders are thinking in terms of arresting Elon Musk’s assault on federal agencies. When Schumer was asked at a press conference Tuesday whether he would fight for language to protect the U.S. Agency for International Development and the freshly gutted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, he said: “In terms of trying to get in the appropriations bills undoing lots of the many things that they’ve done that are wrong, yes, we’re certainly going to make an effort to do that.”
This is a bit of an odd promise: It’s already the law that the president can’t refuse to distribute congressionally appropriated funds. What are Democrats going to do—add language that they, and the Constitution, really mean it this time? Maybe they could add some explicit language requiring certain numbers of employees at the hacksawed agencies. But … if Trump ignored it once, why wouldn’t he just do so again? Whatever Democrats do, this won’t be settled until the Supreme Court rules in the showdowns over executive power that Trump has been cueing up.
Again: not the most fertile grounds for good-faith negotiations.
Democrats, for now, are working to put the ball in Republicans’ court: Republicans run the government, and it’s their responsibility to fund the government. “Here’s the bottom line,” Schumer said Tuesday. “The Republicans are already shutting down good chunks of the government. Democrats don’t want to shut down, but it’s in Republicans’ hands; it’s up to them.” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, said, “It is the Republican majority’s responsibility to gather the votes necessary for them to pass their agenda,” while House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries emphasized that Republicans “control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government.”
The message here is that Republicans would be blamed for any shutdown since they’re the governing party, and also because Republicans are, in fact, to blame for most of the shutdowns we’ve had in recent years. But not all of them.
It’s little remembered, but Senate Democrats filibustered a funding bill in January 2018—when they were similarly locked out of power—because they couldn’t attach to it protections for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It lasted only a weekend, because Democrats quickly realized they’d be blamed for the shutdown and decided to cut their losses. Because that’s how culpability for government shutdown works: The party making the policy demand takes the blame. And holding out longer only digs that party further into a hole.
Let’s say there’s a situation in which Democrats and Republicans can’t reach a deal by March 14, and Republicans put a bill on the floor to extend current funding levels for some duration, maybe even months. It’s hard to see Democrats, especially their swing-seat members, staying unified enough to block that on the grounds that it ignores their demands to offer more protections for threatened federal agencies. Because that argument, right now, may not be a winner.
The deadline, then, may give Democrats their first real leverage point, and the temptation to stockpile a laundry list of demands is understandable. But it’s not the strongest element in their tool kit. Litigation, by contrast, is the most immediate way to block Trump’s most brazen efforts to unilaterally remake the federal government. And communicating how such changes would negatively affect people’s lives is the long-term means of turning public opinion against the president’s agenda.
That includes, by the way, messaging about the separate legislative effort that the GOP, all on its own, will be in the thick of by mid-March: predictably trading trillions in tax cuts for cuts to Medicaid and food stamps. If Republicans want to overplay their hand, there’s no reason to get in their way.
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