Ben Curtis/AP Photo
Democratic members of Congress listen as President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, March 4, 2025.
Unless Congress acts, the government will shut down in just a week, on March 14. Trump wants Congress to pass a simple continuing resolution to keep the government funded for another six months, so that he can continue his strategy of selective slash-and-burn. But he can’t accomplish that without some Democratic votes.
Will Democrats play hardball and refuse to help Trump keep the government open unless he stops shutting down the government piecemeal? Or will they revert to their sometime self-appointed role of Grownups in the Room and help save Trump from himself?
The debate about the terms on which the government stays open is also on track to rendezvous with a historic Supreme Court decision which will likely hold, 5-4, that it is illegal for Trump to selectively withhold funds duly appropriated by Congress. That outcome was foreshadowed by Wednesday’s high court action refusing to overturn an order by federal District Judge Amir Ali that Trump must unfreeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid. The Court temporarily suspended its own order while Judge Ali sorts out details, pending issuance of an expected permanent injunction.
Other district court decisions have also directed Trump to cease blocking the expenditure of lawfully appropriated funds. These cases will very likely be consolidated in a single high-court case. The key justice here is Trump’s most junior appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, who voted with Chief Justice John Roberts in Wednesday’s 5-4 order, and who has had little sympathy for extra-constitutional executive overreach.
If the Democrats demand that as a condition of keeping the government open, Trump must keep the whole government open, they will only be acting to enforce the likely Supreme Court ruling rejecting Trump’s effort to close down the government selectively.
LATER THIS MONTH WILL COME the battle over the FY2025 budget. On February 25, the House passed a budget resolution to start the reconciliation process, specifying taxes and spending over the next decade.
In that contest, Trump wants to square an impossible circle, both fiscally and politically. Trump has called for permanent extension of his 2017 tax cuts, which expire this year, at a ten-year cost of at least $4.5 trillion. He also wants additional tax cuts that will incur further budget costs, including no taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits.
These numbers just don’t work. There is simply no way to achieve this without either politically unpopular offsetting program cuts or an increase in the federal deficit, which would spook the Federal Reserve and cost him the support of Republican fiscal conservatives.
Republicans are also divided over whether to repeal or modify the $10,000 limit on tax deductions for state and local taxes paid, which Trump included in his 2017 tax cuts as a way to punish high-expenditure blue states. But it also punished affluent Republican voters and gave Democrats in swing districts a powerful talking point against Republicans.
If the Democrats stay unified in the fight next week over keeping the government open, they can probably hang tough in the sequel over the budget.
In his latest move, Trump on Wednesday night surprised House Speaker Mike Johnson by making a demand (via Truth Social, no less) that Congress keep the government open by passing a simple six-month continuing resolution, which would allow spending at current levels. For many Republican fiscal conservatives, that is unacceptable because it continues government spending at the levels of the last Biden budget.
Trump’s dog whistle to Republicans is that he is not really spending at those levels because he is selectively impounding funds. And that’s where Trump loses Democrats.
Trump may or may not be able to get the continuing resolution through the House, where the Republicans have just a four-seat majority. But in the Senate, where Republicans have 53 seats, it takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster; and the continuing resolution can’t pass without some Democrats’ votes.
But the politics are tricky. If the government does shut down, who takes the fall?
The two shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 did far more political damage to the Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich than to President Clinton. Conversely, the terms of reopening the government in 2013, which included the budget sequester and changes to the Affordable Care Act, made President Obama look weak. In ending the 35-day shutdown of December 2018-2019, the optics made it look as if Trump had given up more than the Democrats.
This time, Democrats need to unite behind one principle: If you want our support for keeping government open, the resolution needs to commit you to opening the whole government. Some Democrats, though, may not want to risk being blamed for the shutdown, and prefer to wait for the fight over the regular budget, where arguably they have the stronger hand by opposing cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.
That would be a mistake. If they stay united, they can win both battles.
