Democrats have done their best to make the continued government shutdown about Donald Trump and Republicans, but the facts don’t lie.
Not only do Republicans have the facts on their side, but they also have some statements from Democrats that prove that the standoff was a calculated move on their part.
While it briefly appeared that the Democrats' preferred message was sinking in with voters, the GOP has pushed back, and based on recent polling, the American people have been paying attention.
Democrats had two big opportunities to make healthcare subsidies -- supposedly the primary sticking point -- permanent during the Biden administration, but all they ever did was temporarily extend them.
The first time this occurred was in 2021 when Democrats used reconciliation to pass the American Rescue Plan Act. Since they were using reconciliation, they did not need any GOP support, but they only extended the cuts for one year, and they expanded eligibility for those cuts to people in higher income brackets.
In 2022, when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act via reconciliation, they could have made the breaks permanent, but chose to extend them through the end of fiscal year 2025, a move I believe was purposeful and strategic.
Rather than make the cuts permanent, Democrats set a time bomb that would expire during the next presidential term. I believe they did this to create leverage if Biden lost the election, which he did. Any Democrat saying this was all they could get at the time is just flat-out lying.
To my point above, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) all but confessed that this was his party's strategy last week, bragging about the position in which Democrats have put themselves.
Schumer stated, “Every day gets better for us. It’s because we’ve thought about this long in advance and we knew that health care would be the focal point on Sept. 30 and we prepared for it … Their whole theory was — threaten us, bamboozle us, and we would submit in a day or two.”
The GOP used that quote for a recent ad, putting Schumer’s words into the mouth of an AI rendering of the senator.
Schumer's statement is about as close to a confession as you will ever get that Democrats had this strategy planned all along. That one comment from the senator may be why the momentum has swung back to the GOP on this front.
The GOP took a bit of a hit about a week ago in polling on this subject, but now, Trump and Republicans are holding firm, as the American people appear to be wising up to what is going on here.
CNN’s Harry Enten explained, “In 2018/2019, Donald Trump’s net approval rating was already falling. The shutdown was eating into his popular support. It was down 3 points already at this particular point and would fall considerably more.”
He continued, “This shutdown hasn’t even hit Donald Trump’s support at all. His net approval rating is actually up a point. This one is not hurting him at all. There’s no reason Donald Trump might say… ‘I want to get out of this shutdown.’”
For my money, the GOP has done a great job handling the situation. They have offered the Democrats a stand-alone bill to extend the tax credits for another year and also a promise to negotiate reforms for the next bill. They have offered a clean continuing resolution. Yet, the Democrats have rejected the proposals at every turn. This is their shutdown, and the American people appear to be figuring that out.
