‘If You Don’t Want This Consequence, Don’t Vote for Republicans’

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:19My name is David French. I'm a columnist for New York Times Opinion, and you may have noticed I'm not Michelle Cottle, our normal host for this roundtable. I'm the backup quarterback today, but I'm here with first stringers, my fellow columnists Jamel Bowie and Michelle Goldberg. Guys, how's it going? Everything's going great in America. As well as it can go, I suppose. Everyone's happy today. Okay. Maybe punch drunk.

0:50On Tuesday, we're recording this on a Wednesday. Tuesday, Democrats and Republicans in Congress were unable to come to an agreement on a spending bill to keep the government operational. And as a result, we're in another shutdown. And power struggles that got us here, the strategies to consider are really important to understand whatever ultimately becomes of this. So let's just start very, very high level. Michelle and Jamel, what's your very quick, top level, immediate reaction? Michelle, do you want to go first? Well, I think Democrats had no choice but to shut down the government. I do think that their messaging has been sort of weak and incoherent, and I don't have super high hopes for them actually accomplishing anything significant.

1:42Yeah, I have a similar view of Democratic messaging, that the relentless focus on health care here, I think, ends up being more harmful than helpful. I think the ideal position for approaching these budget negotiations was simply to say, listen, all this year, the administration has been refusing to respect congressional appropriations, has been unilaterally cutting programs, redirecting funds, spending mysterious sums of money, and we're simply not going to agree to a budget deal that preserves the administration's ability to do that. We will agree to a budget deal that will include some sort of guarantees or mechanisms that can prevent the administration from doing that.

2:29That's simple, easy to understand, no government money for a president who doesn't obey the law. And it puts the onus on the Republicans who run the government, who have the White House, who have been looking the other way on this stuff. but turning this into negotiation over healthcare subsidies. In addition to feeling just small ball and like non-reactive to like what people actually care about, not to say that people don't care about healthcare, but you know what I mean? Like people are, their blood is hot about these other things. And Democrats are like, let's talk about healthcare instead.

3:02And so I don't know how this all plays out, but I do think that Democrats took what was, what has always been not a great hand, right? Like they are in the minority and they played it quite badly, which is maybe the story of the modern Democratic Party. So, Michelle, you said no choice. I was very interested in that you said no choice because it seems to me that this is obviously a choice. It's a strategic choice to try to, as Jamel was saying, accomplish something concrete on assuring spending guarantees or, you know, you've got the health care subsidy issue and the affordable care out. Why are you saying no choice here?

3:36Well, I think that, look, we have a president who is completely lawless. we are in a free fall towards authoritarianism. You have a Democratic Party electorate that is absolutely furious at their leaders. I mean, I cannot overstate the amount of anger there is towards Chuck Schumer in particular. Something that I think is very different than this and other shutdowns is the complete refusal of Republicans to negotiate or make even the barest concessions. I mean, this was not the case with, say, like the new Gingrich shutdown during the Clinton years. You know, Clinton was never saying my offer is fuck you.

4:17Excuse me. I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on this. And so given this set of circumstances, I mean, I think that the OK, I guess, yes, you always have a choice. But the choice here was between total capitulation and public acknowledgement of complete powerlessness or using the tiny bit of leverage you actually have. And to me, that's not really any choice at all. So we're definitely going to circle back to the political strategy here. But let's pull back a little bit and talk about why you shut down the government. We've seen a number of them recently. There were three under Trump's two administrations.

5:01So why is this happening? Why do we keep going back to this particular tactic when I'm not sure that looking back, I can point to a concrete thing that a single shutdown has really accomplished? You know, I think part of this, how do I put this? I think that part of the recurringness of the shutdown as a political tactic actually has less to do with particular tactical or strategic decisions or visions with the respective parties, but just the extent to which Congress no longer operates by anything that looks like regular order, right? Like doesn't operate according to what I think people may imagine Congress operates.

5:44Oh, well, at the beginning of the year, beginning of the fiscal year, they like to pass a budget, et cetera, et cetera. They pass individual bills to deal with like particular issues, et cetera, et cetera. Like none of that happens. Congress runs on these continuing resolutions for the most part. There's basically sort of no capacity, it seems, to write a traditional kind of budget and pass it into law. And to the extent that there's any lawmaking capability anymore, it is centered around these reconciliation bills, which end up being these like omnibus fiscal bills that are mostly written by leadership and then sort of tossed onto the floor.

6:17And so the deterioration of Congress's capacity to actually engage in traditional lawmaking, I think actually just creates the scenario, right? It creates these deadlines by which if a continuing resolution isn't passed, the government doesn't get funded. And then that becomes the terrain for a bunch of gamesmanship and maneuvering and tactical nonsense or whatever. But I think if you had a Congress that was functional, right, if you had a Congress that looked like the Congress that existed in, pick a random year in the 20th century, 1954, you wouldn't see this kind of thing. Maybe you can throw in, right, like sort of partisan polarization, ideological polarization, the extent to which there no longer is a kind of flexible middle within Congress.

7:09But I would really zero in on the collapse of Congress's capacity to do anything, which honestly is downstream, I would argue, is downstream of the kind of hard-nosed congressional politics that emerged with Gingrich and the late 80s and 90s and continue on into the 2000s up to the present. So, Michelle, a lot of what Jamel says resonates with me. I mean, I've been banging the drum of Congress not working for a really long time. I'm, I think, the oldest person on this podcast by a bit. So I'm going to pull the old man card and say, I remember back in my day, you could have a situation where a closely divided Senate, for example, could result in an 80-20 compromise where you would actually have the different factions get together, a reach across the aisle on areas of common interest and reach a compromise solution.

8:04Is this where we are, Michelle? Is this just what it looks like to say Congress is doing something in a dysfunctional era? Is this just what it looks like for Congress to do something? I don't even know if it's so much that it's like Congress is doing something. I think it's more that what it looks like for Democrats to, with their very, very weak hand, say we are not going to be complicit in this administration's kind of rapid dismantling of American liberal democracy. And the problem, of course, is that that's not their message. That's not their rationale. And I think part of the problem with the way Democrats have approached this is that I think people can feel the gap between their rationale, which feels kind of consultant-brained and focus grouped and what people say in private and what's truly motivating both the voters, but a lot of the politicians themselves.

9:05I mean, I think it's important not to minimize the impact of these coming price hikes for health care. They're going to be like devastating and shattering for a lot of people. So there's an argument that shutting down the government over this kind of raises the salience so that when people get the notice that their health insurance is going way up, they can kind of connect it to what's happening in Washington. I think that makes sense. But at the same time, it's alighting the issues. And so, yes, I mean, to me, I kind of take it for granted that Congress doesn't function anymore and hasn't for a long time.

9:44But I think we're a step beyond that in that, you know, this is like a little bit different than what we've gotten used to over the last few years where a sort of creaky and increasingly dysfunctional system kind of chugs along, breaking down from time to time. Like this is the, you know, kind of rapid disassembly of the American project. And there's no precedent for how you behave in this situation. So let's talk a little bit about the impact here, because the impact really matters. It matters on a human level. It's going to matter on a political level. So it strikes me, and looking at this and looking at the debate over health care, that I'm getting a little bit of deja vu around the big, beautiful bill.

10:32Because the big, beautiful bill had this sort of classic Republican extension of tax cuts and really partially, very partially paid for by Medicaid cuts, which seemed like a, you know, what would see like a classic Republican kind of policy proposal. However, we don't have the classical Republican party. The Republican party is becoming much more working class. Educated voters are moving more towards the Democrats. So in fact, Medicaid cuts are going to impact more Republicans than they used to. Is there a scenario here where the Republicans are actually not reading their own room in a sense, that their own base is becoming, as it's becoming more working class, that playing games, say, with healthcare subsidies or Medicaid cuts or financing tax cuts in part through Medicaid cuts, for example, that's just not something that's going to be successful for the Republicans anymore.

11:32Is that shift underway or is that or is the loyalty here, the baseline partisan loyalty just so great, it's just not going to matter? Part of the irony of all of this is that the Democrats are basically begging the Republicans to let the Democrats save them from the political consequences of their own ideology, right? I mean, I think it goes without saying that huge spikes in insurance is going to be pretty bad for Republicans. And so the Democrats' big ask in all of this is something that substantively is obviously the right thing to do, but actually politically is shooting themselves in the foot if they win.

12:12Just to comment on that real quick, this is where I feel like I do sound terrible. because it's sort of like stipulating this is bad for people i i and we've discussed this before david you know i i'm kind of on this you know let what's that line from rocky four if he dies he dies like you know if if this is what happens it's what happens because you voted for republicans and that's this is the consequence and if you don't want this consequence don't vote for republicans and i don't think that i think that part of what's been broken in american politics is a feedback mechanism that the choices voters make do not reliably result in feedback that helps them understand the choices that they make and properly contextualize them.

12:58So looking at the Republican side, a Republican voter receiving Medicaid may not necessarily understand that as the same Medicaid that a black voter in New York receives. They may see that as two different things. Setting that aside, which I do think is part of a factor here. The extent to which, A, Democrats do work to soften the blow of these sorts of Republican cuts, and so you kind of allow voters to have their cake and eat it too. You have the extent to which people don't, Republican voters even, seem to see Trump as something distinct from a Republican, and their allegiance to him is more cult of personality-ish than it is sort of ordinary political leader-based relationship.

13:48And so they continue to give him extremely high ratings, even if he is doing things or supporting things that actively harm them. And so the president, right, and Republicans looking at the president aren't getting the right feedback mechanism either. They're doing unpopular things, but it's not really diminishing intra-party standing. And so there's no reason for them to not do those unpopular things. And then the collapse of the Democratic Party in so many places, where Republicans have incumbent offices, means that there isn't necessarily the kind of political competition that might do the work of reminding Republicans, right?

14:27That the composition of their electorate has changed and that these things might harm them. It's just like, there's no feedback happening, right? And so they can, these premiums can spike, the Medicaid cuts are going to go in. And it's actually, to my mind, indeterminate whether or not it's going to have the kind of political impact I think Democrats might like. And I think the only way it will is through sort of, you know, active political action, political education, you might say that's a very staid way of putting it. You could say demagoguery around the issue in order to show voters what is happening.

15:03And I think part of that probably does have to involve a willingness to not be the responsible adults. And I'll wrap this up by saying that I think a real Democratic Party political problem is so many of the party's leaders, their identities are wrapped up in this idea that they are the responsible adults of American politics. And so it's up to them to sort of like do what's right in every circumstance. And I'm not sure that's true. You know, I've seen a pattern for about, oh, 10 years now involving Donald Trump, where imagine that a rock falls into a pond and it causes a giant splash. And then the rock gets away with blaming the water for the splash.

15:45This is the way Trump, he's like a force of chaos. He jumps into American politics. He generates a giant amount of radiating collateral damage and then is very good at blaming everything else for the damage that he creates. And this is one of the things that I'm concerned about with the shutdown strategy, if you're talking about a strategy to oppose Donald Trump. I think it's pretty clear that a supermajority of Americans don't want a government shutdown. It's not clear to me at all that that same supermajority would then migrate towards holding Trump responsible for a shutdown as opposed to the Democrats, especially as the pain continues to sort of radiate out from here.

16:28You know, some of the consequences, you know, there's going to be disruptions of services. There's going to be possible delays in Social Security applications there. You're going to have situations, for example, where air traffic controllers keep working, but they they don't get paid. You also might have a situation where Trump uses whatever legal ambiguities are created by a shutdown situation to engage in permanent reductions in force in the federal government that will further impact the provision of federal services. So there is going to be pain. And the question, though, to me is, is this a situation where you've got the base leading the party astray and it's pushing the party into a confrontation that whatever it sort of merits is the three of us talk about it is just going to land like a thud with the American people.

17:14First of all, I think that everything you just said about the drawbacks of a shutdown and the pain of a shutdown and the political risks of a shutdown, I basically agree with. I mean, I just think that we're in a situation where there were no good options. There are no good options. When your country is in the midst of an authoritarian transformation, you sort of don't have good options by definition. And so I guess I would turn it back to you. If you have a president who already has sort of no intention of abiding by any sort of budget deal that is duly passed by Congress, if you have a president that is completely unconstrained by all the levers of government and a Congress that has been completely supine, Do you just say, if you're a Democrat, like, okay, we are going to sign on and fund this without demands or preconditions?

18:16I mean, my own position is in the abstract. Like, if you're talking about a negotiation between two sophisticated parties. But there is no negotiation. Yeah. And one of them absolutely positively, I cannot trust to abide by any agreement. In that circumstance, I'm not entering into an agreement with that person. But that's not the overall calculus. If I'm in a situation where I'm in an impossible negotiation situation, I'm in the right, but I have real concern that the consequence of my stand is actually going to harm my cause more than it helps my cause. that's a consideration that would give me pause if i have am i aware of a super majority not wanting the very policy that i'm pushing that would be something that would give me pause and i don't offer that to say that there is that the democrats are clearly wrong here i offer that to sort of reaffirm what you know i think is a theme that both of you all are saying which is sometimes there are not good options.

19:18There's just not a clear forward path, short of winning elections. I mean, we're all talking about this as if it's the Democrats that did it, the Democrats that shut down the government, right? But of course, Republicans control every branch of government and Republicans are free to do away with the filibuster and go and pass this thing, right? I mean, Republicans have all of the power here. And yet so much of the discussion, and this is, I think, a meta problem maybe for not just the Democrats, but for our kind of understanding of politics, and this is something Jamel talks about all the time, that we always act as if only Democrats have agency.

19:59And so part of the messaging has to be, if Republicans want our help, they have to come to the table. And if they don't, they run the government. and they are free to pass a budget on their own. Yeah, and I'll say that I think to get back to kind of this, the broken mechanisms of political accountability in American politics right now, I think part of the problem is that I'm not sure that Donald Trump perceives that he's very unpopular. Somewhat lost, I feel like, in a lot of conversations around what's happening. It's just the objective fact that Donald Trump is very unpopular. But it's not clear to me that Trump perceives that whatsoever or that the people around him perceive that whatsoever, that I think they see themselves as operating according to some kind of definitive mandate from the electorate, from the people, singular, undivided, unchanging.

20:53I think that you take these exact political circumstances and just insert a president who wasn't so convinced of their like essential popularity, and you would have a negotiation, right? Because that president would recognize, like, I'm actually in a weak position right now. You can tie this as well to the president's sort of penchant for like, you know, authoritarianism, right? His desire to run the government in an autocratic manner. He just doesn't perceive himself as needing Congress. And so like negotiations to Congress are just not a skill that he really has. You know, I have a slightly different sense of that Trump political dynamic.

21:29I completely agree. He's a man who acts like he just won, like he was Reagan in 84 or Nixon in 72, you know, like one of these 49 state mandates. And he acts as if he got some kind of mandate like that when he's boasting, when he's speaking. But in an interesting way, he governs as if the only thing he has to be is more popular than the Democrats, that he governs in a way often that I see it as intentionally designed to provoke Democrats or in some cases, not Democrats, people on the far, far left into actions that are even less popular than his. So, for example, I think it's a pretty obvious to me when you watch the conduct of ICE in these cities that ICE is being very deliberately physically provocative.

22:18It is being very physically aggressive. It is spoiling for the kind of fight where you see masked protesters throwing things at federal buildings or lighting cars on fire or things like that. And so my question is, is this a similar situation where, in essence, what he's doing is, on the one hand, empirically unpopular with most Americans? I don't think most Americans like the aggression of the immigration enforcement. But with this kind of diabolically shrewd aim towards provoking opponents into an even less popular response, with the kind of notion that he doesn't have to outrun the bear he just has to outrun the democrats so i i would i buy that that maybe is trump's theory of the case and i think it maybe works in election years when the public kind of forgets donald trump but i'll know that like in during his first term this didn't work right like this isn't working now to use immigration as an example the main effect of this ICE reign of terror is to polarize Americans against ICE and against the Trump administration on an issue that he is supposed to be strong on.

23:32So I'm not sure that this works, right? I think that trying to provoke a more unpopular response can be effective if your opponent does give you that more unpopular response. But here, it's not clear to me. it's hard even for trump to simultaneously say i am like the uncontested unitary leader of the american government and then also i'm just a little baby i'm just a little guy and the democrats aren't playing ball with us so yeah i'm never going to do that voice again um it's i don't think that you can do both at the same time i don't think he's successfully doing both at the same time. So, Jamel and Michelle, you both seem to say right at the get-go that you're not sure that the Democrats are handling the messaging correctly here, that they're not reaching the American people with their best and strongest arguments.

24:29That seems to be a persistent problem with the Democrats, that there are a number of major moments that they can sometimes seem to appear that they're fumbling. They seem kind of misaligned, certainly, with the evolution and changes of the online attention economy. Where are the Democrats on just reaching the American people? Why, in your view, do they fumble this matter? And why is it, it seems as if the Republicans in some ways are lapping among this attention economy. Is it as simple as, well, control of the algorithms on some of the major social media platforms has shifted and it emphasizes certain kinds of content and deemphasizes other, or is it far more sophisticated and far more, you know, in sort of a from a longer term worrying than something like that.

25:18So I think that that's I mean, look, I don't think that you can separate the algorithms, you know, especially something like X, but also increasingly Facebook. I mean, I don't use Facebook personally, but I have a professional page where I post my articles. And what I'm being fed on that page, what's showing up is just like the most kind of base right-wing slop. And so if that's kind of what the algorithm is giving someone like me, I can only imagine what it's giving other people. But then the other piece of it, and the piece that's kind of easier to fix in the short term, is that Democrats have the wrong leaders.

25:56You know, Chuck Schumer might be a good dealmaker. He might be the right Senate majority leader in a Kamala Harris presidency when they're trying to craft legislation. But he's very, very wrong for this moment. He's like, he's a bad communicator. He clearly doesn't understand or at least know how to operate in this informational ecosystem. He's like very focused on kind of winning the morning in D.C. or in the Beltway media. He's attached to a set of norms and procedures and assumptions about the way politics operate, none of which are still in effect. And, you know, he's just kind of not a wartime consigliere.

26:41And so, you know, these other things are long-term problems. This is an easy one. It's not easy, but if people have the will, it can be fixed in relatively short order. Yeah, I was, I had, he's not a wartime consigliere on the tip of my tongue the entire time you were speaking. So I'm going to reference another piece of media that people watching this at the very least may know, which is from The Wire, season four, when Marlo Stanfield says to the security guard, you want it to be one way, but it's the other way. And I think Democrats, Democratic leaders want it to be one way. They want it to be a way where we're engaged in normal congressional politics, where Donald Trump is maybe an extreme version of a normal Republican president, but something close to a normal Republican president.

27:31that are operating in familiar territory. The map is clear. There is no fog of war. But that's just not the case. That's not where we are. We are in a time that demands political creativity and a willingness to take risks, a willingness to pick fights. The algorithm is powerful, but it's possible to game the attention economy, but it does require one to challenge the terrain, not fight on Republican ground the entire time. And that's just not a skill set that anyone in Democratic Party leadership has been selected for. They've been selected for consensus. They've been selected for binding together a large and often, you know, fractitious party.

28:20They're not selected for articulating a set of principles, not backing down from them and picking fights around them. And until that changes, I think that Democrats are going to have a hard time responding to these conditions. And part of the problem is that this is self-perpetuating. The people who have been selected for traits that are not good for this moment are themselves in charge of selecting candidates or recruiting candidates. and are demonstrably hostile or at least skeptical of people who don't take that approach, who are more conflict-driven, who do see the value in picking fights and establishing principles.

29:02That's what fights do. Fights help you establish for the public, this is what I stand for. This is what I won't back down from. And people don't know that about Democrats. I mean, I think, you know, people might think that Democrats are too far to the left. They might have all these other complaints. But there's also a fundamental thing that people say about Democrats, which is that they don't know what they stand for. Right. Are you just are you just an elaborate set of institutions to elect a handful of like, you know, ambitious people? Or is there something actually is there a vision for the country that you actually have?

29:33Is there a picture of what you want this place to be? And I don't think Chuck Schumer can answer that question. I don't think Hakeem Jeffries can answer that question. I would bet that there's maybe a handful of Democrats in Congress who can answer that question. Oh, I think there's more than that. I think there's more than that. You're more, okay. I mean, I think we're in total agreement about the leadership, but I definitely, I talk to Democrats all the time who I feel like can articulate that if they were given the platform to do so. Yeah. I'll just say sort of as the former Republican conservative voice on the podcast, my perception of Democrats has never been that they don't know what they stand for and don't know how to fight.