Why the Coming Shutdown May Be a Long One

Typically, when Congress and the president fail to enact spending legislation to keep government agencies open, a blame game ensues. After a few days, or a couple of weeks, one party eventually realizes from public opinion polls that it is losing that game. So to avoid lasting political damage, the suffering party capitulates, the government re-opens, and the country goes on with its business.

There is good reason to believe that not only will we see a shutdown by the end of this week, but also that ending it won’t be so easy. Why? Because this shutdown would be instigated by not by one party, but by one man—a man who has shown little regard for public opinion, polls and the long-term viability of his political party.

Donald Trump has called for a shutdown so many times—always in an attempt to secure ample funding for his proposed border wall—that you may have stopped taking him seriously. To recap, in May 2017, when he first declared on Twitter, “Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!” it was a hot air blast to mask the fact he had accepted a proposal to keep the government open through September of that year without Democrats conceding on the wall. In August 2017, he reiterated the threat, yet a few weeks later abruptly accepted a Democratic proposal to both keep the government open and raise the debt limit.

In January 2018, it was the Democrats who instigated a brief shutdown, hoping to codify protections for young undocumented immigrant “Dreamers.” Once that shutdown ended and negotiations to keep the government open through September were nearing a successful conclusion, Trump mused, “I’d love to see a shutdown if we don’t get this stuff taken care of.”

All this year, Trump has kept the threat alive—in April, June, July, and early September. Then he flinched again. Republican congressional leaders, terrified at the prospect of owning a shutdown right before the midterm elections, boxed him in. In late September, they gave Trump two separate spending bills that kept parts of the government open through September 2019, and attached to one of them a measure to keep the rest of the government open past Election Day, into December. The longer-term elements touched on areas Trump likes to brag about supporting: military operations, veterans’ care, maintenance of our nuclear arsenal and anti-opioid programs. Perhaps reluctant to veto spending on his key priorities, Trump signed the bill without a fuss.