Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is playing a huge game of chicken with Republicans regarding the government shutdown.
Schumer and Democrats are digging in on the message that they are simply standing firm for healthcare funding, claiming that the GOP's policies will significantly raise its costs.
Republicans are holding firm in their position that the funding the Dems want is for non-citizen coverage, and neither side is budging, and that fact led to Schumer trying a Hail Mary this weekend.
Democrats seem to think they have public sentiment on their side on this one, but polling tells a far different story.
Katarina Flicker, a spokesperson for House Majority PAC, a super PAC for House Democrats, stated, “The American people understand clearly that Republicans forced a government shutdown because they are hell-bent on defunding Americans’ health care. It will cost them at the ballot box in 2026.”
The polling that I have seen shows that 65% of Americans blame Democrats for the shutdown, and Democrat voters are split 50-50 on the issue, which his not a good sign for liberals if they think they are going to make this an election issue. Now, that could change the longer this shutdown goes on, so we have to keep an eye on public sentiment, as that will likely dictate who caves first.
That is why House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and the GOP continue to pound the reality of the funding that Democrats want, stating, "It's very important for us to say who's being hurt in this. This is real pain to real people, and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats in the Senate seem not to care.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) never saw a microphone he didn’t love, so he was more than happy to chime in with his take on how the shutdown is going so far.
When asked about his thoughts on the shutdown, he responded, “I am proud of those people who are standing up right now and saying, we’re not doing business as usual in Washington with this many millions of Americans are literally going to be hurt.”
He continued, “We are in a crisis. We need a president to stand up and bring us together to help to solve the problems of American people.”
The longer this shutdown goes on, the more fingers are going to be pointed, and I suspect we will start to see some Democrats crack. Republicans only need five more of them to walk over the line and defect, so they need to hold firm.
Schumer has to know that he is losing this battle in the eyes of the public, so he once again leaned into claiming that the Jeffrey Epstein files are the real cause for the shutdown, stating, “Look, Johnson’s not serious about this. He sent all his congressmen home last week and home this week. How are you going to negotiate?"
He continued, “The reason he sent them home is because he’s more interested in protecting the Epstein files than protecting the American people from the health care crisis.”
Schumer concluded, “We’ve been trying for months and months to sit down with them and have a serious conversation addressing America’s health care needs. And they’ve refused and refused and refused.”
In my opinion, the moment you go off topic, you have already acknowledged that your strategy is not working, and Schumer did that by throwing the Epstein files back into the debate. When Barack Obama was in office, the government shut down for more than two weeks over the Affordable Care Act, and while I don’t expect this shutdown to last as long as that one, I do expect it to continue for most of this week, if not persist into next week. This is a blinking contest at this point, and I think polling will dictate who blinks first more than anything else.
