Republicans, thanks to their recent intercameral sniping, have already succeeded in making the slow dénouement of the D.H.S. shutdown squarely about them, at least in the élite media. (TMZ’s coverage has had more of a “plague on both your houses” flavor.) Since it was the Democrats who initially forced the shutdown, however—and in light of the liberal psychodrama that has engulfed the Party’s use (or not) of such tactics, dating back more than a year now—it’s worth pausing to ask what they have gained from it. If Party bigwigs were accused of caving after the shutdown in the fall ended without concessions on the policy objectives they had sought—in that case, the extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies—did they not also cave this time? Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, who was widely blamed for the health-care capitulation despite personally having voted against it, insisted the opposite. “Senate Democrats never wavered,” he said. “We were clear from the start: Fund critical security, protect Americans, and no blank check for reckless ICE and border patrol enforcement.” More surprisingly, this time, at least some liberal pundits and progressive groups broadly agreed.
Since January, there have been changes at D.H.S. Immigration officials announced a drawdown in Minnesota; there has also been turnover among top personnel, including Kristi Noem, the D.H.S. Secretary, who was fired—sorry, moved into the very real job of Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas—and replaced by Senator Markwayne Mullin, who, at his confirmation hearing, promised to tone things down. (Only in Trump’s Washington can a former M.M.A. fighter be considered the deëscalatory option.) But the shutdown didn’t really create the pressure that caused these developments—if anything, public blowback following the killings of Pretti and others led to these developments and to the shutdown. In Noem’s case, the straw that broke the camel’s—or should that be horse’s?—back seems to have been her commission of a cardinal Trumpworld sin: making herself the center of attention by starring in a high-budget, cowboy-coded P.R. flick. And, beyond rhetoric, it’s not clear that Trump’s deportation policy has meaningfully, lastingly changed.
Back in January, Democrats were not willing to accept changes to optics alone, instead demanding concrete legal reforms to rein in agents’ perceived brutality. The current provisional deal does not contain those demands. Sure, Republicans are already starting to resemble Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes as they try to pass the deal and legislate more funding unilaterally—they have a razor-thin majority in the House, where angry hard-liners hold great sway and any party-line bill could be hampered by the push and pull of certain members raising concerns about budgetary largesse and others trying to lard up on other priorities—and this will be good for Democrats politically. But, if or when Republicans pass a bill, it will ultimately be on their own terms. Schumer’s defiant remarks could come to resemble a different “Simpsons” meme, involving the hack lawyer Lionel Hutz repunctuating an ad for his services: “Senate Democrats never wavered? No! Blank check for reckless ICE and border-patrol enforcement!”
I predicted, in January, that if Democrats failed to secure significant concessions, with Republicans on the back foot, the backlash would be fierce. Apparently, I was wrong about that; prior critics of Schumer et al. seem mollified by the idea that Democrats showed fight, and kept their hands clean. In January, I also wrote that, as instruments of leverage for a minority party, shutdowns are not cost-free magic wands. (They might be more like bubble wands: diverting for a bit but risky to hold on to for too long.) Democrats must work within a disorienting universe in which policymakers sometimes seem bound by the normal rules of political gravity—Republicans did begin to back off Trump’s mass-deportation campaign after its tactics became unpopular—and other times just do whatever they want. In the fall, I argued that Democrats were unfairly thrashed for failing to secure health-care concessions that were not immediately attainable. This time, I felt that they might have had enough leverage to impose potentially life-saving accountability on D.H.S., even if a compromise that involved any funding at all for immigration enforcement would surely have been unpalatable to sections of the base. Democrats were not avoiding blame for the airport lines—like TMZ, voters appeared to be poxing both houses—but, in the zero-sum Beltway game, they didn’t seem to be losing in the court of public opinion; Republicans, if anything, were being blamed slightly more. Maybe a partial shutdown was never going to be enough. Maybe the gravity of the killings in Minnesota justified taking the whole government hostage all along.
