Isaac Saul (17:55)
All right, that is it for what the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to my take. So nothing about the shutdown actually feels normal. Perhaps most importantly, there just isn't a real centerpiece issue here. In 2018, the shutdown was about Trump's demand to fund a border wall. In 2013, it was over the Affordable Care Act. In 1995, it was about cuts to Medicare and education being demanded by Newt Gingrich. What is this shutdown about? Democrats want to make it about health care and Affordable Care act subsidies, but the shutdown isn't really about healthcare. It's about power. It's the Ezra Klein argument that Democrats need to stand up and fight back against Trump because funding a government operating the way his government is operating is no longer tenable. Republicans wanted to make the debate about Democrats trying to fund health care for illegal immigrants, but that story is misleading to the point of fabrication. Now Republicans have all but abandoned that argument and pivoted to the idea that they are the party of health care who's trying to reopen the government, while Democrats refuse to. Truthfully, though, Republicans are fine if the government remains shut down because President Trump doesn't care if the government remains shut down. Which brings me to the second odd thing about this standoff. Nobody seems interested in actually reopening the government. There are no urgent meetings between president and the House speaker. Congress is not even convening to find a solution. Democratic politicians feel their base is behind them, even government workers. And why not? The threat of layoffs is not so harrowing, given that Trump clearly doesn't need the pretext of a shutdown to fire people. Instead, he invited Doge and OMB to slash government staff when the government was open. At least now Democrats can tell those government workers and their constituents that they are fighting back. Many Republicans, meanwhile, view the shutdown as a live audit, an opportunity to purge government employees and programs that they see as extraneous. If you're quiet enough, you can hear Russ Vaught rubbing his hands together. Of course, Republicans would be pivoting if it were politically advantageous, but they think they'll win the messaging war the longer the shutdown goes on. And with Trump's bullhorn, they may be right. The third thing that is so odd about this shutdown is that something specific has actually brought us to this point, and almost nobody is talking about it. It isn't Trump being a fascist. It isn't Democrats trying to subsidize healthcare for immigrants here illegally. It's much more mundane. It's that shutdowns are always about funding the government, and our current government funding is totally unsustainable. The Washington Post editorial board is one of the few places I've seen pointing out this dynamic explicitly. Remember, the Affordable Care act, however well intended and popular, is still not affordable for the government. During the pandemic, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats passed a massive expansion of emergency subsidies to support healthcare programs like the aca. Those emergency subsidies for healthcare, student loan forgiveness, and food stamps were supposed to be temporary, but as is typical, if voters acclimate to a government benefit, that program becomes much harder to cut. This was the traditional conservative these won't be temporary. In this case, they were right. Congress massively expanded its spending during the pandemic without providing a funding mechanism for it and has not undone those expansions. Meanwhile, Trump came into office with a dire fiscal situation that needed to be resolved by some combination of raising taxes or cutting federal costs. Instead, he tried to pass off the job of fiscal responsibility to Doge. But that initiative was a farce that extended maximum pain onto government employees and axed overseas programs for little more than table scraps. The $20 billion Argentina bailout TRUMP just approved cost roughly double the combined savings from all of Doge's cuts, roughly $1.4 billion and Congress's $8 billion in USAID fund funding cut. As we keep saying, in order to seriously cut the budget, the government has to reduce spending in Social Security, healthcare and defense. The president hasn't touched the first two, and he continues to approve historically large military spending bills, all while the Pentagon remains incapable of even passing an audit. Then, on the other side of the coin, Trump has extended tax cuts from his first term that were also meant to be temporary. So here we are, $37.9 trillion in debt, no plan to pay for the most popular, important or expensive government programs, and nothing to do but to try to distract voters into hating the other side on fabricated or irrelevant grounds. Frustratingly, infuriatingly, none of that has anything to do with ending this shutdown. For that, we'll have to see when Americans start to really feel pain and who they'll blame it on. Ultimately, Democrats are the ones holding up a funding CR for their demands, and the biggest pain point for Democrats in the past may have been when food assistance programs and health service for seniors started to run dry. Today, though, the Democratic base is wealthy and highly educated. It's a crude political calculation, but this shift may make Democrats more tolerant of these issues than they had been in the past. Conversely, a lot of Republicans are sounding the alarm about this coming cliff and and in a relatively new development, it might be more politically perilous for Republicans if these entitlement checks stop flowing. Instead, the biggest pain point of this shutdown for Democrats may be when the lack of normal operations starts to impact day to day life. Thanksgiving week will be a key test. How chaotic and broken can US Airports get with limited TSA and air traffic control staff? How tolerant will Democrats be of such a public mess when they can reopen the government with a vote at any time? For Trump and Republicans, the biggest pain points are already arriving, but the president is trying to find ways to mitigate them. When military pay was supposed to freeze last week, Trump took unconstitutional read illegal action to keep checks flowing to active duty soldiers. Republican senators described the move as varying degrees of inappropriate, but none seemed eager to take back the power of the purse. Meanwhile, Democrats are unwilling to hold the president accountable for paying military personnel, and in the end I doubt many Americans noticed or cared except for active duty soldiers and their families, whom I presume are quite relieved. The president seems keen to use a similar process to restart loans for struggling farmers who are being hit hard by his tariffs or keep other politically popular programs alive. Basically, the government is shut down, but the party in power is finding emergency funding to make it all a bit less painful for their favored copy constituents. It's anyone's guess what happens now. We're barreling toward the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Republicans have a governing trifecta, but also can't move the ball without Democratic votes and seem keen to sit tight. They're displaying a sort of governing by breaking it attitude first adopted by Trump but now taken up by the party wholesale. Meanwhile, Democrats have the strength of their healthcare argument. Costs go up if nothing is done, but conveniently have no plan to pay for the billions in funding. That fund four years ago was sold to the public as emergency and temporary. Truthfully, my best guess is we see little to no movement until the problems become untenable for the public. It'll take nightmarish travel delays, disappearing food stamps, impossibly long waits to resolve healthcare snafus, and reports of degraded military readiness before anyone comes back to the table. And then, unfortunately, we'll have to wait for Congress to actually agree on something. All right, that is it for my take. Ari Weitzman, our managing editor, has a staff dissent, so I'm going to pass it over to him for that.