Democratic Senators Think You're Stupid

Democratic senators think you’re so fucking stupid.

The latest argument as to why Senate Democrats chose not to use the filibuster to stop the Republican CR, advanced by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, is that shutting down the government somehow gives the president heretofore-undiscovered Special Super Secret Shutdown Powers that allow him to just reorganize executive departments willy-nilly, and somehow gives him broader hiring and firing authority than the broad authority the president already has. One thing you'll notice when Democrats make this argument is that they never have a source, they never have a citation. There's never a statute. There's never a provision of the Constitution. There's never a regulation or a case or an advisory opinion or even a fucking law review article. There's nothing! It's made up! They think that you're gonna fall for the idea that there is some power Donald Trump gets in a shutdown—some dictatorial power that fulfills his wildest dreams—that he didn't use the last time there was a shutdown on his watch, in the winter of 2018-2019. I don't know why we're pretending like we don't know how he acts in a shutdown. We do! He mostly whined a lot and, crucially, did not use it to enact purges of the civil service, because that is not a power presidents have in shutdowns.

Shutdowns don't give you special powers. They defund the government. They force you to stop operating parts of the government—which, by the way, they're already doing—but they force you to do it constitutionally. Trump and Musk are already doing a government shutdown. They're already doing a rolling shutdown of whatever departments they like! Forcing an actual shutdown, a legal shutdown, by breaking the congressional appropriations process is a reassertion of the constitutional order. Not only is it a reassertion of the constitutional order, it's the only way the only way the Democrats have available to them to show that they're not spineless. And if Democrats are spineless, they should own it instead of asking us to imagine a world where their surrender was in fact very brave. That Sheldon Whitehouse thread really pissed me off, and so did Schumer's arguments—some of which I saw on Chris Hayes and some of which I saw in his floor speech, in which he said a shutdown would give Donald Trump “the keys to the city, state, and country.”

Your political party is not healthy, generally, if its leaders are busy justifying their failure to act as an opposition party by warning about a special imaginary shutdown authority that no one can provide a citation for. No one can explain how it works. They just boldly make the assertion that in a shutdown the president has broader hiring firing and reduction-in-force authority. As I understand it, the law is pretty clear on what authority the president has in a shutdown: through his appointed agency heads, he has authority to make emergency furlough decisions, but emergency furloughs are different under the law from regular furloughs and RIF furloughs, and they are not permanent. But that hasn’t stopped Senate Democrats from arguing that House Democrats and the federal employee unions foolishly overlooked the president’s Shutdown Powers (and no, you may not see the shutdown powers.) I haven’t exactly done a deep dive on the law here, so maybe there really is an obscure advisory opinion from 1995 or something that says the Shutdown Powers are real—but I can’t find anything, and the total lack of any citation from Schumer and Whitehouse means they can’t either.

Someone said something along these lines me and I think it's a good point: trying this maneuver belies a misunderstanding of who the Democratic base is now. Because of education polarization, the Democratic base is incredibly educated now, especially when you look at a primary electorate, which is disproportionally educated relative to the general election Democratic base. Democrats are now people who pay far more attention than the average American, people who follow the news more closely, people who have higher political knowledge than the average American. I'm not saying that as a value judgment; that's just a fact. Democratic voters are gonna be harder to fool than Republicans because they're paying closer attention. Pulling this maneuver on the new Democratic base—one that is incredibly educated, one that is according to polling increasingly skeptical of Democratic leadership—this is not a base that's going to just buy whatever bullshit you're selling. It has to be at least facially convincing. And maybe I'm just a lawyer so I know what a legal argument is supposed to look like, and that's why it's pissing me off, but if I know what a legal argument is supposed to look like—if I know that you can’t just make claims without citing an authority—then surely former Rhode Island Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse knows better, too. It is just...galling how little they think of the intelligence of their own voters, to think they would fall for this. They pretend without proof, without citation or source, that there is some special mystery power the president has in a shutdown, a power that has never been used or even discovered before. It's just a lie. (And Whitehouse’s thread reveals another lie: the senator from Rhode Island voted against cloture on the Republican CR, but now he’s running interference for the yes votes, indicating that Chuck Schumer was telling the truth when he said he had the support of his caucus.)

Senate Democrats would rather lie to their own voters than stand up and fight. How fucking sad is that?