A shutdown, though perhaps not a “long and damaging” one, still appeared likely: later on Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson said—from the not-red red carpet of the (almost unbelievably) high-budget Amazon documentary about Melania Trump—that the House cannot come back before Monday to O.K. any Senate deal, a delay that would close parts of the government through the weekend at least. Meanwhile, an effort to quickly push the compromise through the Senate failed, principally, it emerged, because Lindsey Graham was mad that the deal would block some senators, himself included, from receiving monetary damages for the Biden-era Justice Department having subpoenaed their phone records, as part of the January 6th investigation. On Friday, Graham suggested that he would cede, for now. As of this writing, the deal was on track to pass—maybe even in time for the senators to leave for dinner.
Already, though, the mere prospect of Democrats engaging in a deal with the Administration over ICE has excited liberal outrage: scrolling through X earlier, I saw plenty of posts accusing Democrats of caving again, one of which described Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, as a “fascist collaborator”; responding to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s insistence that a ban on deporting U.S. citizens must be part of any final D.H.S. funding agreement, Graham Platner, the populist Senate candidate in Maine, asked, “Why are we negotiating over things that are ALREADY illegal and banned by the Constitution?” Platner added, “I knew Democratic leaders were stupid and ineffectual. I had no idea they were THIS stupid and ineffectual.” I’ve shared similar sentiments before, albeit less bluntly. But I’m not sure that the latest evidence points cleanly toward the same conclusion—at least, not yet.
In some ways, the calculus that Senate Democrats faced this week wasn’t so different from that which led them to shut down the government in October. The importance of being seen, by their base, as fighting back against Trump has, if anything, only intensified as the Administration’s behavior has grown more nakedly outrageous. Last time, Democrats focussed on health care, which is an unambiguously good issue for the Party; immigration was until recently seen as something like the opposite, but the revolting, ostentatious callousness of Trump’s deportation operations—even before Border Patrol agents killed Pretti—seems to have changed that. (According to the data journalist G. Elliott Morris, Trump’s average approval rating on immigration dipped durably underwater last summer and has continued to trend down; one poll, conducted in the hours after Pretti’s death, found that forty-six per cent of Americans support abolishing ICE entirely.) In another sense, the context this time was different. A leading argument for the October shutdown was that it would give Democrats the chance to concentrate public attention on otherwise diffuse Trumpian crises. In recent days, public attention has seemed to consolidate itself; if anything, Senate Democrats have been the ones reacting to it.
This reality may have given Democrats an even stronger hand this go-around; indeed, Republicans seemed to recognize as much and moved to do a deal broadly on the Democrats’ terms. In the gamified language of the Beltway press, Democrats appeared to use the minority’s chief source of institutional leverage—the Senate filibuster—to score a policy “win,” a rare outcome in shutdown fights. Yet it’s not clear that Democrats have won just yet. With people dying at the hands of federal agents and Trump’s immigration abuses already front and center, they need to secure not only attention but concrete reforms; it remains unclear whether Republicans will be willing to sign off on Democrats’ proposals, and, if so, at what price. Already, some G.O.P. lawmakers, including Graham, are speaking of extracting concessions on “sanctuary city” policies. It’s also legitimate to argue that Democrats have frittered away some of their power here, especially with public opinion so firmly behind them. They could have taken the other unpassed funding bills hostage to get what they want. They could have refused to sanction any new funding for D.H.S., period, until they do.
It’s tempting to see shutdowns as a straightforward moral choice for Democrats: stand up to tyranny or pony up for it. In reality, though, they are imperfect instruments of accountability. Opting to cut off D.H.S. would not have stopped ICE, necessarily—the agency is flush with backup funding passed as part of Trump’s megabill last summer—and would likely have posed more difficulties for less controversial parts of D.H.S., such as FEMA and the Coast Guard. And Congress has other tools at its disposal. At the time of the October shutdown, its Republican majorities had mostly rolled over to let Trump tickle their bellies—when they did anything at all—but they have lately displayed spasms of critical thinking over Epstein, Venezuela, Greenland, the Fed, and, now, deportations. Indeed, the bipartisan passage of funding bills, a departure from recent practice, has itself been styled as a reclamation of congressional authority from Trump, especially given that, in doing so, lawmakers rejected the most swingeing cuts to the federal bureaucracy that his Administration proposed for the coming year. At the same time, the relative novelty of congressional Republicans’ public criticisms of the Administration should not be mistaken for strength—mostly, they’ve been woefully tepid, given the circumstances. Others have speculated that the Administration could simply ignore the expressed will of Congress, on the recent bipartisan spending agreements and any future guardrails placed on ICE. Democrats, in other words, may have done a deal to do a second deal that might not be good on its own terms, and, even if it is, might not be worth the paper it’s written on.
