I have consistently expressed my frustration with the different ways that Democrats are talking about the shutdown in public, compared with what they’re asking for in private. In public, this is just a fight about a looming health care cliff, using the leverage of needing Democratic votes (at least under current Senate rules) to pass government funding to demand that Republicans avert a crisis of millions of people losing their insurance coverage or seeing the price of it double. In private, this is a fight about extreme executive power and autocracy, with Democrats demanding that any government funding they pass must actually be spent, not withheld or rescinded. A No Kings Budget, in other words.
That private conversation is becoming somewhat more public. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) has been the most eloquent on this topic; he told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on Friday that “I actually don’t think that people will join this fight unless they think the stakes are actually existential … whether or not the polls tell us that everybody in the country believes that democracy is at risk—it is at risk.”
Even House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) made a rare acknowledgment that the Democratic counteroffer includes restrictions on withholding or rescinding funds last week on MSNBC. “We can’t simply proceed as if this is business as usual,” Jeffries said. “If we reach a bipartisan agreement, then we’ve got to make sure there are enforceability mechanisms to ensure that the agreement that was reached is actually kept and that the Trump administration follows the law.”
But by and large, Democrats have positioned the shutdown as about health care, which is very easy for Republicans to dismiss as unrelated to funding appropriations. No Kings provisions, by contrast, are at the heart of the appropriations question: How else do you make a deal with someone who will break it?
Now that Democrats have gone down the health care path, an endgame is not hard to predict. Republicans have expressed themselves open to a “conversation” about health care, and that might evolve into an “assurance” of negotiations, but only if government funding is passed on a short-term basis to give space for those negotiations. And you can see enough Democrats deciding that this assurance is something real to take that deal. Already, three senators who caucus with Democrats—John Fetterman (D-PA), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), and Angus King (I-ME)—have supported a continuing resolution to fund the government, and Republicans only need at most five more.
If there’s a way to switch this out, to make the need for No Kings (which is quite popular) the primary focal point of the shutdown fight, Democrats have a better chance of getting out of this with something. But you don’t want to drop the health care conversation entirely—there really is a risk of millions of people losing insurance when enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire in December, and people in Republican districts will be disproportionately hurt, raising stakes that White House officials are keenly aware of, even if they won’t admit it in public.
Getting Republicans out of their political jam isn’t the Democrats’ job, but I’m not so sadistic as to let millions of people lose health insurance and tens of thousands die to make a political point. And the fight will expose the Republican reluctance to fund coverage for people who need it, making it more clear who is responsible if a solution fails. Cementing that government has the responsibility to provide affordable health coverage for all, even in Republican government, is valuable, even if the ACA is flawed. It will be useful for a more universal system down the road.
So what’s the off-ramp, where Democrats can fight out government funding that actually gets funded, and save the health care conversation that Republicans are going to want to have for later? Well, one magically showed up last week: an imminent farm bailout.
Thanks to Donald Trump’s own policies, farmers in America are taking a beating. High tariffs have caused China to freeze all soybean purchases from the U.S. The Treasury Department is bailing out Trump’s ideological confrere Javier Milei in Argentina, a leading export producer of … soybeans, and those exports to China are soaring. The same dynamic is happening with beef, as Australia replaces U.S. exports to China. And the shutdown is making things worse, because Farm Service Agency offices are closed, making it impossible for farmers to get services and plan loans for input needs next season.
In his first term, Trump simply funneled $28 billion in cash to farmers who were also hurting from his tariff policies and the pandemic. The money came from a New Deal–era program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), which can be delivered directly to farmers. Trump is ready to rerun this policy again. But there’s a hitch: In the first term, the CCC was flush with cash, but now it’s almost empty, with only about $4 billion available.
The numbers are even in the same ballpark: Republicans surmise $35 to $50 billion for the farm bailout, while the enhanced ACA subsidies cost about $35 billion a year. There’s a world where just ending the damn tariffs would eliminate the need for this farm bailout, or reorienting our farm economy away from commodity crops and toward foods people actually eat, but Trump’s obviously dug in. So why can’t the price of the bailout be providing health care to people? You could add in robust funding for the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, which funds much of the baby formula in this country and which is on the verge of insolvency.
From a political standpoint, Republicans are being let out of a big self-created jam here, on health care and agriculture policy alike. But Democrats would be getting a win on the issue where they are trusted the most. More important, they would get statutory guarantees that Trump can’t double-cross them on the budget. Personally, I would ask for more and tie them to things Trump actually desires—any delays on spending could nullify the Air Force One travel budget, for example. Democrats could throw in making D.C.’s government whole after a $1 billion cut to their budget earlier this year.
Put that all together and it’s not a bad haul for the party in the minority. There’s no world in which Democrats get everything they want when they hold no levers of power. But they can use the bits of leverage they have to end the assault on government and congressional powers of the purse. And they can help millions of people avoid a financial catastrophe. That’s about the best we can hope for.