Is Another Government Shutdown on the Way?
The last federal government shutdown began on December 22 of last year, when President Donald Trump vowed not to fund the government unless lawmakers agreed to allocate $5.7 billion to build his oft-promised border wall. He folded 35 days later, begrudgingly signing a three-week spending deal that provided for exactly none of that $5.7 billion figure. What was already the longest government shutdown in American history also proved to be the most pointless.
Now, as the next funding deadline—November 21—looms, some Democrats are concerned Trump will again grind things to a halt in the nation's capital, this time over a different acrimonious public disagreement with Congress: its impeachment inquiry. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he’s “increasingly worried” that Trump will consider shutting down the government to create a “diversion away from impeachment.”
These concerns were exacerbated, presumably, after Trump refused to rule out that very possibility on Sunday. “No, no, no,” Trump said at first, when a reporter asked if he’d hold up funding over impeachment—but then, just as quickly, he appeared to walk this assurance back. (Sometimes it is difficult to tell which question, if any, Trump is actually responding to during these impromptu press conferences outside the White House.) “We’ll see what happens,” he continued. “I wouldn’t commit to anything. It depends on what the negotiations are.”
Although the Senate is in Washington, D.C., this week, the House is in recess and Monday, Veterans' Day, is a holiday, which leaves only eight working days to hammer out a deal. According to Politico, both parties want to get a full appropriations package done by the end of the year, but there has been little progress thus far as they fight over—what else?—funding for a border wall. Alabama senator Richard Shelby, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, told Politico that the “compressed” timeline, the parties’ divergent positions, and the impeachment inquiry’s demands on lawmakers’ time and attention probably make the December 31 deadline a difficult one. Appropriators from both chambers and both parties are set to meet next Tuesday.
Democrats, of course, would not view the exercise of their constitutional oversight responsibilities as a legitimate bargaining chip in the political process of funding the government. But such normative concerns are of little interest to Trump, and given that he imagines himself as a savvy dealmaker who is unafraid to play hardball, it’s easy to see him adopting a zero-sum view of the battles to come: Every hour Congress spends haggling with him over the wall is one less hour it can spend investigating his alleged crimes instead.
Even if Trump doesn’t purposefully sabotage spending talks, the man is not known for his levelheaded demeanor when dealing with his Democratic counterparts, and that’s when a legal procedure that might result in his removal from the Oval Office isn’t underway. Impeachment, in other words, could further complicate what is already a delicate negotiation. "The optimistic theory of the case is we're going to fight about [impeachment], but we're going to do our job on appropriations," Hawaii Democratic senator Brian Schatz told CNN. But the pessimistic outlook, he acknowledged, is that impeachment “will cause Donald Trump to be even more unpredictable and dug in, and then it's going to be very hard to make a deal."
Trump isn’t the only one who might consider taking the government hostage here. A key talking point among the president’s allies is that the House’s inquiry is constitutionally deficient. This position is wrong and delusional. But as James Wallner of the conservative R Street Institute recently reasoned to Roll Call, if Trump-aligned Republicans believe what they’re saying in public—that impeachment is, as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy puts it, just a plot to “reverse the results of the 2016 election”—they might be tempted to functionally defund that plot, if they have the votes to do so.
Government shutdowns occur whenever the House and Senate can’t agree on a funding plan that the president is willing to sign. For as long as the two chambers remain deadlocked, federal law generally requires whatever agencies or departments Congress hasn’t funded to put employees on furlough, and as of now, lawmakers have not yet appropriated money to pay their staffers for fiscal year 2020. But under guidance issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, legislative branch employees may continue working during a shutdown, albeit without receiving paychecks until the government reopens, if their tasks are “necessary to assist the Congress in the performance of its constitutional duties.”
Impeachment is, despite the White House’s insistence to the contrary, a congressional duty outlined in the Constitution, so staffers assigned to the inquiry presumably wouldn’t be sent home to sit on their hands. A shutdown would mean, however, that the people responsible for handling much of the behind-the-scenes, day-to-day work involved—prepping members for hearings, drafting questions for witnesses, and so on—would suddenly be going without pay during the holidays. The combination of their impeachment workload and their colleagues’ sudden absence would put an even greater strain on the already limited resources of congressional offices and committees, too.
If the House and Senate can't pass appropriations bills by the end of next week, they could still avoid a shutdown by striking a deal to keep the government open at current spending levels—a stopgap fix known as a continuing resolution. According to Politico, Shelby and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have discussed continuing resolutions that would kick this can down the road to December 13 or December 31.
But reporting from The Washington Post suggests that House Democrats might want to wrap their inquiry around that time, and before the holiday recess. If they meet this goal and vote to impeach, passing a continuing resolution now might just create a delayed conflict with the high-stakes Senate trial that would follow. Texas Republican John Cornyn told CNN he’s already concerned about the prospect of having a trial and a spending fight at once, since serving as a juror in the president’s trial is the sort of all-encompassing senatorial task that leaves precious little time to accomplish anything else.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was a bit more sanguine than Schumer when asked if she thinks Trump will let impeachment affect funding talks. “[Republicans] don’t care about shutdowns because they don’t believe in government,” she recently told Bloomberg. “However, I do think that they learned a lesson from the last shutdown, since it didn’t do them very well.” She’s referring here to the fact that that shutdown, by just about every imaginable metric, was a disaster for Trump and his colleagues, and they thus may be skittish about trying it again. In addition to the fact that Trump didn't get the wall money he sought, he shouldered the blame for the gridlock, too: Shortly after the shutdown began, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 47 percent of respondents held Trump responsible, compared to only 33 percent who blamed Democrats. As documented by FiveThirtyEight, voters grew frustrated with both factions as the stalemate dragged on, but they grew more frustrated with Trump than they did with Pelosi and company.
With Election Day 2020 less than a year away, the president’s bid for a second term could play a role in his decision-making calculus, too. Trump’s approval rating hovers in the low 40s. And two shutdowns and an impeachment aren't exactly a winning pitch to swing-state voters. During the last shutdown, independents were especially likely to sour on the president—on average, FiveThirtyEight observed a seven-point increase in the proportion of these all-important 2020 voters who decided Trump was at fault. If history is any indication, forcing a protracted shutdown over an obviously self-interested goal is not likely to redound to his benefit.
Then again, Trump is not always a person who learns from history or from anything at all; as CNN reports, some Republican aides and lawmakers “privately acknowledge that a frustrated Trump is a wild card.” As the deadline draws nearer and as more witnesses who know things tell Congress about the scope of his misconduct, facilitating another messy distraction might end up being his best defense—or, at least, a defense.
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Originally Appeared on GQ
