While the country keeps a wary eye on the latest spectacle on Capitol Hill, some D.C. establishments are trying to have a little fun with the government shutdown.
On Wednesday, a local restaurant called Butterworth’s tried to lighten the mood by offering a themed drink menu, including a “furlough-rita” and a “continuing rye-solution.” It’s one of the few bright spots in an otherwise tense standoff that shows no signs of ending.
For minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), it’s a tricky spot to be in. Not only is the hypocrisy aspect dogging Democrats (Speaker Mike Johnson’s X feed has Democrat leaders on a loop decrying the stupidity of shutdowns), but no one is quite sure what Democrats expect to gain by grinding the government to a halt. Even the few brownie points Schumer might gain from supposedly “standing up to Donald Trump” are crumbs compared to the buzzsaw of public opinion, which even the liberals at The New York Times polled as bad news for the minority.
There was no sugar-coating it for the Left in the Gray Lady, which found that a full 65% of Americans objected to Democrats moving forward with a government shutdown. In “a further dagger” to the heart of Schumer’s party, even his own base is surprisingly split (47% for, 43% against).
Making matters worse, Democrats have no real case for pulling the plug on federal funding. As outraged as they may be over the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, trying to overturn President Trump’s signature legislation, after he won the popular vote, and in a Congress controlled by Republicans no less, is a fool’s errand.
Even Democrats like John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who’s sounding more reasonable by the day, recognize what a frightening precedent that would set. “I’ve at least been one [who] says, ‘Hey, now, I would love to restore a lot of those health care things.’ That’s the right outcome,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union,” “but that’s a dangerous tactic if you’re going to shut the government down for one of our policies. I condemned it when the Republicans threatened to do that thing. And it’s entirely wrong for us to do the same thing.”
Old soundbites are becoming increasingly stubborn things for his party, as footage from some of the most extreme Democrats echoes like bad campaign ads. “It’s not normal to shut down the government when we don’t get what we want,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has argued. “Families will be hurt. Farmers will be hurt,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is caught saying. “This shutdown — you know who’s going to feel the pain?” radical Democrat Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) asked last year. “You know who it hurts? You. Everyday people and the most vulnerable. Seniors, veterans, working families, hungry kids, y’all.”
Even the man who’s putting his party in this precarious position sang a very different tune almost one year ago. “If the government shuts down, it will be average Americans who suffer most. A government shutdown means seniors who rely on Social Security could be thrown into chaos,” Schumer claimed.
So what changed? For the minority leader, his grasp on power. After Schumer’s March decision to cooperate with Republicans and keep the government open, he was savaged by the radical fringe. How dare he engage in civil debate! How dare he give the appearance of bipartisanship! Resist Trump or step down!
As his Oklahoma colleague, Senator James Lankford (R), told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Tuesday evening, “This is all about Chuck Schumer’s personal politics, all about it. Multiple Democrat[ic] senators that I’ve talked to have said, ‘Hey, we should just keep it open. We should keep it going — except for Chuck Schumer and his politics that he’s in right now.’ So we’re there; I get it,” he shrugged. “We’ve got the socialists that [are] leading the mayoral race in New York City right now. The New York politics have shifted hard, hard, hard to the far, far, far Left. And Chuck Schumer is trying to be able to fight off the far-left socialists in his own party on it. And we’ll see where that goes.”
Vice President J.D. Vance also cut through the media’s noise to the heart of the issue. “The primary reason the government is shut down,” Vance claimed, is because “Chuck Schumer is terrified he’s going to get a primary challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” in 2028. “Here you have a career politician who is more afraid of his reelection … than he is doing what’s right for the American people,” Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) agreed. “This is what happens when you have a career politician.”
In the meantime, any slim hopes that insiders had for a quick end to this standoff came to a predictable end on Wednesday when both parties offered their versions of a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the lights on. The Democrats’ bill, which essentially overturns Trump’s signature OBBB legislation, failed again 47 to 53. The seven-week extension from Republicans, which had the backing of two Democrats — Fetterman and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto — and one Independent, Angus King of Maine, also didn’t manage to attract any new cross-aisle support, striking out by a 55-45 vote.
Of course, the irony of the situation — and there are several — is that by keeping the government closed, Democrats are effectively handing the keys to Trump. “In a shutdown,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) reminded everyone on “This Week on Capitol Hill,” “the president gets the power of the purse. Donald Trump. [So] they’re not even going to achieve their goal,” he shook his head.
Worse than that, some argue, they’ve supercharged the White House to radically overhaul federal agencies. Under the executive branch, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has a “surprising amount of discretion” in deciding whether the furloughed employees come back at all. Employees whose work “is not consistent with the President’s priorities,” as OMB Chief Russell Vought put it, could pay personally for Schumer’s gamble. Vought has “the power to tell agency leaders to move past the usual furloughs — “temporary, nonduty, nonpay status” — to RIFs [Reductions in Force] — being permanently fired,” Donald Kettl warns.
“Vought could choose the programs that the administration has been wanting to eliminate and give a very big haircut to others,” he continued. “The result would be a dramatic, instantaneous shift in the separation of powers.” The reality is, “The Trump team could kill programs unilaterally without the inconvenience of going to Congress. To top it all,” he added, “this would all be perfectly legal.”
Trump himself has warned of the dire consequences of Democrats not cutting a deal to pass the CR. “We’re doing well as a country, so the last thing we want to do is shut it down,” the president explained, “but a lot of good can come down from shutdowns. We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want,” he said, referring to jobs and spending Republicans have been trying to eliminate.
That’s the trap Democrats find themselves in. “They could roll over and agree to all of the administration’s demands, as they did back in March,” Kettl points out. “That would weaken the party further as leaders try to right the ship. Or they could refuse to give in, trigger a shutdown — what the Republicans are already calling a ‘Schumer Shutdown’ — and then stand back to watch an awesome stripping away of their power. Either way, the Democrats lose. It’s like an old western, where cowboys ride into a box canyon with no way out.”
It’s a sad hill to die on, especially since there’s absolutely nothing controversial in the GOP’s short-term proposal. “I had a lot of colleagues who wanted us to load this up with our priorities, but the leaders decided we should do this in good faith,” Johnson reiterated to reporters. “… There is nothing we can pull out of this bill to make it any leaner and cleaner, it’s absolutely sparkling clean.” If anything, Democrats should be tickled pink that the government is being flooded with the same dollars it enjoyed under their own president.
And yet suddenly, the speaker told Perkins, “They want to throw in $1.5 trillion in new spending. That’s with a ‘T.’ They want to have American taxpayers give free health care to illegal aliens … They want to give a half-billion dollars to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting so they can prop up left-wing media outlets … We’re not doing that,” he vowed. “The American people did not vote for that stuff. And they’re playing games with very serious issues.”
Quena González, Family Research Council’s senior director for Government Affairs, has been talking both to congressional insiders who have seen this coming for months and to regular citizens who were surprised to read about the shutdown in the news. “Proverbs 29:2 says that when the rulers of the land are righteous, the people rejoice, but when the wicked are in authority the people groan,” he observed. “The current stand-off, in large part over subsidies to fund abortion under the guise of ‘health care,’ is an opportunity for Americans everywhere to pray for wisdom for those in authority.”
In a sign of how dire the political situation is becoming, the Senate (whose work week rarely begins before Monday night and which famously rushes to the airports on Thursday morning) is now toying around with coming back on Friday to vote, once again, on the clean CR. Wednesday at sundown to Thursday at sundown is Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holiday associated with personal reflection. “We can only hope,” González added, “that on reflection righteousness will prevail.”
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer for The Washington Stand. In her role, she drafts commentary on topics such as life, consumer activism, media and entertainment, sexuality, education, religious freedom, and other issues that affect the institutions of marriage and family. Over the past 20 years at FRC, her op-eds have been featured in publications ranging from the Washington Times to The Christian Post. Suzanne is a graduate of Taylor University in Upland, Ind., with majors in both English Writing and Political Science.
