By: Audrey Fahlberg – nationalreview.com – February 18, 2025

Trump is ‘shutting down the government already. And so, we shouldn’t enable a further shutdown of services,’ Eric Swalwell said.

As congressional Democrats search for a unifying message with which to resist President Trump, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) argues there is “common ground” among her colleagues around the “necessity to refuse handing over the keys” to a Republican Party that is dismantling parts of the federal bureaucracy at breakneck speed.

Leveraging a federal government shutdown before funding runs out on March 14, she said, is a prime example of this strategy in action.

“If Republicans want to shut down the government because they’re not able to get their house in order, that’s their business,” Ocasio-Cortez told National Review in an interview last week. “But the idea that we’re just going to hand over the keys to a Republican majority” as they “attempt to dismantle the Department of Education” and “raid the Treasury — they’re going to have to do that with their own coalition.”

She’s not alone in this sentiment. Over the past few weeks, a growing chorus of congressional Democrats have started to signal that they’re willing to weaponize a government shutdown as a bargaining tool in their broader efforts to scale back the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts.

In Representative Eric Swalwell’s (D., Calif.) view, voting in favor of a Republican-authored stopgap funding bill — called a continuing resolution, or C.R. for short — to keep the federal government open will only enable Trump’s efforts to dismantle it. Trump is “firing government workers, freezing federal aid, forcing resignations, making us less safe, and we’re paying more,” the California Democrat told National Review in an interview last week. “He’s shutting down the government already. And so, we shouldn’t enable a further shutdown of services.”

If Speaker Mike Johnson’s stopgap funding bill is “just a continuation of further shutting down the government,” Swalwell warned, “you’re not going to see me, at least, participate.”

Out of power and divided in strategy, a significant number of congressional Democrats eager to appease their base say they are prepared to go big to push back against Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). They say this year’s GOP trifecta in Washington means it’s Republicans’ responsibility to avert a shutdown, and the in-power party’s leaders shouldn’t rely on their votes to keep the government humming this time around.

Slim House GOP majorities in recent years have required House Republicans to rely on Democratic votes to pass government-funding bills, enraging the rightmost flank of the GOP which has long preferred single-subject spending bills to mammoth continuing resolutions. Those tensions came to a head in late December, when House Republican fiscal hawks, Trump, and Elon Musk pressured Johnson to abandon his first legislative attempt: a pricey, 1,547-page, bipartisan continuing resolution chock-full of Democratic sweeteners.

A second, 118-page, Trump-endorsed resolution also failed when 38 House Republicans voted no on the House floor in opposition to a provision that would have increased the country’s borrowing limit. (An almost entirely united Democratic caucus also voted against that second attempt, largely over frustrations that Johnson abandoned his bipartisan bill, icing their party out of negotiations in the process.) Johnson lucked out on his third try, but only after nixing a Trump-preferred debt ceiling increase.

Mindful of these intra-GOP tensions, some Democrats are trying to get creative by using fiscal hawks’ talking points against their Republican colleagues.

“If Elon Musk and DOGE has found all of this fraud, and waste, and abuse — hundreds of billions of dollars, as they claim — well, then, we can’t fund the government by C.R. anymore,” Jared Moskowitz (D., Fla.) mused on the House floor last week. “The C.R. would re-fund all of that waste, fraud and abuse that DOGE has found,” he said, “which means the only way to fund the government is to fund it by individual spending bills.”

All these Democratic shutdown strategies carry risks. As Politico columnist Rachael Bade observed last week, Democrats may be walking into a trap if they follow through on this threat. If they do not work with Republicans to avert a shutdown, “Democrats would be embracing a tactic they’ve long shunned: holding the government hostage until they get what they want,” Bade writes. “There’s also the challenging message of explaining to Americans that you’re shutting the government down in order to save the government. The argument might make sense here in Washington, but it’s pretty damn confusing for every other American.”

The Trump White House is reveling in the chaos. One of the biggest takeaways from all this drama, staffers say, is that Kamala Harris’s 2024 defeat represents much more than a political loss for Democrats.

“Everything that they did over the past four years has been quickly rolled back” by executive fiat, a Trump White House official told National Review. And their own base isn’t letting them off the hook on the anti-Trump resistance front. “They’re finally feeling pressures that I haven’t seen Democrats feel in a while, which is from their own people, who are saying: ‘You guys aren’t doing enough.’”

These optics aren’t lost on Democratic leaders who are clearly worried about taking the heat from voters for a shutdown. Last week, the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee sent an email to Democratic lawmakers in Washington advising them against making light of the rapidly approaching March 14 funding deadline. “Do not suggest Democrats can or are making unilateral decisions on government funding,” the memo said, according to the New York Times. “Do not get caught up in discussing the process of funding the government, make specific demands, or downplay a government shutdown.”

For now, at least, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) doesn’t sound like he’s spoiling for a shutdown fight. In a February 3 Dear Colleague letter, Jeffries said he has communicated to House GOP leaders that Democrats will support bipartisan legislation to fund the government on the condition that Republican efforts to defund certain agencies are “choked off.” Last week, he sought to place preemptive blame on Johnson in the event of a shutdown, telling reporters that “House Republicans have chosen to walk away” from good-faith negotiations.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has struck a more forceful tone in a clear effort to rein in shutdown talk among his own members. “Democrats stand ready to support legislation that will prevent a government shutdown,” Schumer wrote in a February 10 Dear Colleague letter, which also insisted the onus is on Republicans “to get serious and work in a bipartisan fashion to avoid a Trump Shutdown.”

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Source: www.nationalreview.com/2025/02/some-democrats-look-to-weaponize-government-shutdown-to-fight-doge/