Shuttered

So the Federal Government is "shut down" again, mainly because Democrats and Republicans alike are convinced that their base voters are with them, and less-partisan voters will blame the other side. Ostensibly, the reasons are that Democrats see no reason to vote for a spending bill that doesn't give them anything in the way of a political victory that they can take back to their voters, and Republicans have decided that now that they're in charge, they shouldn't have to make any compromises. But at the end of the day, this comes down to who the public is going to blame, and therefore, who can campaign on this situation in the run-up to next years mid-term elections.

Personally, I don't see anything particularly egregious in what the Democrats are asking for. And I'm not sure that Republicans will find that their voters were ever so opposed to government interventions in free markets that they'll be happy to pay more (or be unable to pay) for health care, simply so that President Trump can stick it to Barack Obama. Perhaps Republicans are convinced the TrumpRX direct-to-consumer medications plan will placate people, but there are already similar schemes in place.

The interesting thing about President Trump is that his political instincts are at once spot-on and wildly off the mark. There's been a lot of grumbling about government spending, especially since it tends to entail high deficits. To be sure, a lot of that comes from a litany of unfunded tax cuts in recent decades, which themselves tended to be panders to an electorate that wanted more in the way of government services than it was willing to pay for, but even with that, there were programs and projects that could have been trimmed back (or simply tightened up) with little in the way of public objections. But the way the Trump Administration has actually gone about things (with no small amount of guidance from the Heritage Foundations Project 2025 plan) appears to mainly about doing away with government activities that he didn't like, or that were seen as at cross-purposes with Conservative populism. Other programs that could reasonably be considered wasteful, on the other hand, were left in place. It plays well with a Conservative base, but puts off more Liberal-minded voters. And to many people, that seems to be the whole point.

To be sure, it makes sense to pick one side, and risk alienating the other, when one has to make a partisan-coded choice, but there's no real indication that the things that the Trump Administration has chosen to take on needed to be partisan-coded. Take medication prices, the item that TrumpRX is intended to address. President Trump isn't out in left field with his understanding that price regulation by other governments has resulted in a certain level of corporate profitability being generated by American citizens. There are any number of people who would have liked to see reform in the way medicines are priced here in the United States. But there's not much in the way of evidence that removing subsidies for health insurance for lower-income Americans and pushing them to buy direct from manufacturers at higher prices comes out to be a win for them, given that they'll still have their other medical expenses to pay.

So what really is the point behind this fight with Democrats other than fighting with the Democrats? Neither party has ever really been of the opinion that an electoral loss should mean placing their agendas on hold until they can return to power, so there isn't a principle argument to made here. (Especially given that principle pretty much doesn't exist in politics in the first place.) Not that the Democrats have chosen a particularly wise hill to die on themselves... If they don't come away with something that looks convincingly like a victory, they're simply going to have proven themselves impotent, and harmed their brand in the bargain. Not that they'd been particularly effective up to this point, but this fight is going to come with collateral damage that wouldn't have been there, otherwise.

But the big risk for the Democrats is that a loss here re-awakens the argument that it's been nearly a decade since they knew what they were doing. While the standard Republican line is that the Democratic "élite" is dangerously un-American, the real risk for the party is being seen to be run by incompetents. Having allowed themselves to be lulled into a sense that all they needed to do was stand back and watch the Right self-destruct, they've shown themselves unwilling to be roused from that. If they lose this fight, they'll simply have shown that they still don't have it together.