To Win the Shutdown, Democrats Need a Big Switch [View all]

Basing the shutdown on health care is risky. Republicans want a farm bailout too, and that could provide a path to reframing the shutdown as about stopping Trump’s power grabs.

by David Dayen October 6, 2025

I have consistently expressed my frustration with the different ways that Democrats are talking about the shutdown in public, compared with what they’re asking for in private. In public, this is just a fight about a looming health care cliff, using the leverage of needing Democratic votes (at least under current Senate rules) to pass government funding to demand that Republicans avert a crisis of millions of people losing their insurance coverage or seeing the price of it double. In private, this is a fight about extreme executive power and autocracy, with Democrats demanding that any government funding they pass must actually be spent, not withheld or rescinded. A No Kings Budget, in other words.

That private conversation is becoming somewhat more public. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) has been the most eloquent on this topic; he told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on Friday that “I actually don’t think that people will join this fight unless they think the stakes are actually existential … whether or not the polls tell us that everybody in the country believes that democracy is at risk—it is at risk.”

Even House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) made a rare acknowledgment that the Democratic counteroffer includes restrictions on withholding or rescinding funds last week on MSNBC. “We can’t simply proceed as if this is business as usual,” Jeffries said. “If we reach a bipartisan agreement, then we’ve got to make sure there are enforceability mechanisms to ensure that the agreement that was reached is actually kept and that the Trump administration follows the law.”

SNIP*
So what’s the off-ramp, where Democrats can fight out government funding that actually gets funded, and save the health care conversation that Republicans are going to want to have for later? Well, one magically showed up last week: an imminent farm bailout.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-10-06-win-shutdown-democrats-need-big-switch/