The longest government shutdown in American history was stopped because of a sick-out. Specifically, in early 2019, air traffic controllers, after working for weeks without pay, started to call in sick in increasing numbers, leading to flight delays and travel snarls. Eventually, that got both parties to the table to halt the shutdown after 35 days.
The air traffic controllers have recognized their power and decided to get going with things much earlier this time. Delays in Newark, Denver, Hollywood Burbank, Nashville, and many more airports have been reported, even as the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the employee union, has urged members to stop workers from calling out sick. The truth is that the air traffic controller workforce has already been thinned out to such a degree that only a “slight tick-up” in sick calls is enough to ground a lot of planes. It’s going to get worse, because funding for the Essential Air Service, which keeps the lights on at a lot of smaller airports, could run out by the end of this week. So if you want to get somewhere far away, you increasingly won’t be able to do so.
How are our betters in government responding to this? How has this example of the consequences of their actions focused their minds? Well, President Trump called them “Democrat delays.” So I guess get used to hitchhiking across the country in the near future? Or invest in a horse and buggy?
There haven’t been any shutdown talks for a week, just public posturing. Both sides think they are winning the shutdown, giving them no reason to initiate talks rather than just wait for the other side to buckle. In reality, Democrats are “winning” if you believe the polls, which have shown consistently that people are blaming Trump for the shutdown. It follows that they will blame Trump, not Democrats, for air delays and other consequences.
In fact, the Trump administration knows this, because they have backed down from their initial strategy to impose maximum pain on Democrats during the shutdown. Russ Vought said he would begin mass layoffs in “a day or two” seven days ago; they still haven’t happened, as officials decided they would have negative blowback. (“We do not want to appear gleeful about people losing their jobs, of course,” said one administration official. You could have fooled me!) Democrats aren’t flinching at these threats because they know they’re bullshit. The latest illegal threat, that furloughed workers would not receive back pay after the shutdown as required by law, has already been downplayed by Trump’s own party.
The whole shutdown has been like this. Benefit cuts for individuals were floated and then rejected. The Trump administration is more likely to find money (illegally!) to fund federal benefits that are running out than to cut them. Similarly, there have been some grant reversals, but the Trump administration has been doing that since day one, and contrary to the theory that they were surgically targeted against blue cities and states, they have spilled over into Republican areas as well.
The overall impression is that Trump doesn’t want anyone to notice the shutdown, which is an admission that he will be held responsible. He is not the sole determinant of whether people will notice, however, as the airport delays show. When military servicemembers don’t get paid next week, something Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) ensured by rejecting passage of stopgap legislation, more people will notice. Over time, anger will grow, and Trump’s going to be held responsible.
The question, then, becomes what happens when Trump has to go hat in hand back to the bargaining table. I’ve written a lot about how Democrats are having a public and a private conversation simultaneously about the shutdown. In public they are talking about health care subsidies, and despite apparently winning Marjorie Taylor Greene as a convert, there hasn’t been much movement overall. Republicans have a pat response: reopen the government and we can talk about health care after that.
The private conversation, about how Democrats can only pass a budget with guarantees that the money gets spent, hasn’t budged much either, which is natural because it’s taking place in private. Republicans are saying that no president would tie their own hands and weaken their own power. Those same Republicans can, you know, override the president on this and stand up for the relevancy of the institution in which they serve, but I guess that’s too much to ask.
Bharat Ramamurti has a helpful rundown of what Democrats have to really get in order to pass a funding package. He correctly notes that the current Democratic counteroffer raises the vote threshold for rescissions to 60 votes, effectively blocking them. But he adds that Democrats need to raise the punishment for withholding or rescinding funds outside of the rescission process, such as by defunding Vought’s Office of Management and Budget in the event of illegal impoundments. And Democrats can statutorily increase who can sue over impoundment, breaking the runaround the Supreme Court is using to effectively bless the withholding of appropriated funds.
But if Trump would just veto this and Republicans don’t have the spine to defy the president in the name of the Constitution, the options are limited. You could see a “gang” with enough Republicans to vow to refuse to vote for any more rescissions for the duration of Trump’s term, but that doesn’t do much, since Vought has used “pocket rescissions” to go around congressional approval for canceling appropriated funding.
This is the real conundrum that seems like it’s on the periphery of the shutdown but is really at the heart of it. Let’s assume that Republicans come crawling back to Democrats and some deal is reached, whether for future talks on a health care fix or a short-term extension to facilitate that fix. If the “No Kings” measures aren’t added to the government funding bill, there is no reason to believe that Trump will follow through on absolutely anything the government does. That puts the government effectively in his hands. In the shutdown we’re seeing the downsides of that: the emperor king gets all the blame. But in more normal times, it just means that you’ve funneled the responsibilities of government down to one person, and handed over our democracy.