Schumer’s Strange Strategy: Shut Down the Government to Grow the Government

Over the past 10 days, the Senate has voted on the House-passed funding measure to reopen the government six times. Yet 44 left-wing senators, following Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., continue to block the basic government funding bill.

It’s not clear what Schumer hopes to accomplish with this gambit. Never before has the leader of the party that prefers bigger government blocked a House-passed “clean” continuing resolution in favor of shutting down the government.

The bipartisan CR—which has received “yes” votes from 52 of 53 Republican senators and three senators who caucus with the Democrats—would maintain annual funding at prior-year levels with no significant changes.

There’s nothing extreme about the clean CR, unless you count the fact that current spending levels are already far too high—a position maintained by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., the lone Senate Republican holdout.

For rank-and-file Democrats who see themselves as defenders of federal workers and government services, being asked by leadership to support a government shutdown may feel like being asked to go along with Solomon’s “split-the-baby” decree in a custody dispute.

Furloughing federal workers and shutting down large swaths of the government is an unpleasant business, especially for those true believers who think that more government is the solution to America’s problems.

But for Schumer and the senators pushing the government shutdown tactics, part of the rationale seems be to inflict political damage on President Donald Trump.

Schumer speculated to reporters that Americans would blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, even as the Senate minority leader leads the filibuster against the clean CR.

In remarks some have called tone deaf to workers facing furloughs, Schumer boasted, “Every day gets better for us.”

Many Americans disagree with that sentiment. And it stands in stark contrast with some of the overheated rhetoric coming from the Left. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Verm., for example, commented that, “We are living in an unprecedentedly dangerous moment—maybe the worst crisis in America literally since the Civil War.”

Such ominous and conflicting language doesn’t suggest a strong negotiating position, and it belies the fact that this shutdown could end immediately if five more Democrat senators vote for a clean CR—as they did 13 times during the Biden administration.

The senators voting against the bill are instead pushing a $1.5 trillion laundry list of extra spending items in exchange for funding the government through October. Among other things, their alternative funding measure would: remove protections keeping non-citizens from receiving federally subsidized healthcare; fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; extend COVID-era expansions of Obamacare subsidies; and require the Department of Energy to expend funds on renewable energy subsidies.

Unlike the House-passed clean CR, this partisan funding measure comes far short of majority support, let enough support to get through the 60-vote Senate filibuster.

The $1.5 trillion of new funding in the bill would cost the average American household about $11,000 over the next 10 years.

It’s hard to imagine what could convince the GOP majority—which typically favors more limited government—to cave to such outlandish new funding demands.

In the less than seven years since the most recent shutdown, the national debt has risen from $22 trillion to almost $38 trillion. The ballooning debt adds an ever-increasing amount of weight against consenting to a large expansion of government spending and subsidies.

Excess federal spending forces the government to borrow and print more money to pay its obligations, in turn driving the inflation that has eroded workers’ and families’ purchasing power. If Democrats’ alternative funding package were approved, the American people would literally pay the price.

America is on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory, and it can ill afford another $1.5 trillion of federal spending and debt.

A prolonged federal shutdown isn’t the answer, though. The government will eventually reopen, and after it pays its deferred obligations, America will still be no better fiscally than when the shutdown started.

The longer the shutdown persists, the more frustration will build against the lawmakers who caused it. The American people are tired of unnecessary D.C. drama, and most understand that the federal government spends plenty already.

Shutting down the government to try to grow the government is the wrong approach for lawmakers, and it’s the wrong approach for the American people.

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