David’s view
No modern president did more to shrink his job, or to make it less regal, than Jimmy Carter. None have tried to gild and wield its power like Donald Trump has.
So it’s fitting that Carter inaugurated the modern government shutdown, and Trump is trying to make shutdowns politically irrelevant.
Carter played his role in April 1980, when his second attorney general wrote a five-page opinion about what should happen if an agency’s funding runs out before Congress could appropriate more. His answer: It runs out. “No funds may be expended except as necessary to bring about the orderly termination of an agency’s functions,” Benjamin Civiletti advised 45 years ago.
Future presidents went along with that, emphasizing how painful shutdowns would be for the groups voters viewed most sympathetically, like members of the US military and low-income people. Ahead of the 2013 shutdown, when Republicans resisted funding the Affordable Care Act, both parties unanimously passed a bill to keep paying the troops; lawmakers saw the value and shared the credit.
Trump found another angle. He moved $8 billion in military funding earmarked for R&D that will go instead to service member paychecks this month. Congress wasn’t involved. In fact, House Republicans have kept their members at home, hoping to jam Senate Democrats with their spending bill.
And Democrats have already gotten busy attacking the administration’s $20 billion Argentina credit swap — now padded with $20 more billion of outside aid to Buenos Aires — which is unaffected by the shutdown.
Neither party expects a shutdown resolution this week, which Republicans say is a reflection on how beholden Democrats are to the progressive organizers of Saturday’s “No Kings” protests. It’s true that Democratic leaders weren’t popular at the last “No Kings” and would be chased offstage if they folded before this month’s, but organizers have laughed at Republicans who call them “Hate America” and “pro-Hamas” protesters.
“‘No Kings’: How is that objectionable?” Indivisible’s Ezra Levin, a “No Kings” organizer, asked in an MSNBC interview. “How could anybody say that’s anything other than the most American thing since apple pie?”
Republicans can say as much. That’s because, with a few libertarian exceptions, they see a lot to like about Trump stripping power from the legislative branch of the US government.
Trump is undoing post-Watergate norms that took away the president’s right to impound congressionally-appropriated money, strike enemies without congressional approval, and govern without the distraction of politicized investigations — and most Republicans would respond: What’s wrong with that? Who, they wonder, has actually benefited from reining in the “imperial presidency”?
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Sometimes I detect a note of envy in the way Democrats decry GOP enjoyment of Trump’s unapologetically aggressive second term. “A lot of the norms, civic habits, expectations, institutional guardrails that we took for granted for our democracy have been weakened, deliberately,” Barack Obama told Marc Maron on the final episode of the comedian’s honest, angsty podcast.
A conservative would roll his eyes in reply and argue that Obama tested the bounds of presidential power, too; when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts saved the immigrant group known as Dreamers, he signed off on a far-reaching executive decision that Congress never even pretended to approve.
But Trump has gone much further than Obama. In the most interesting parts of Maron’s interview, the former president pointed out that Fox News would have been apoplectic if he had taken a Trumpian turn and sent the National Guard into Texas to clean up crime.
Obama didn’t suggest that what Trump did was illegal, though. He simply noted that Trump had gotten permission from his base and friendly media to act that way, adding that it would stop only if voters got tired of it.
Out of power, that’s what Democrats are doing: pointing to Trump’s actions and waiting, or hoping, for voter anger to show up. The goal of the “No Kings” protest, Levin told me in an interview, is to demonstrate the breadth of opposition to the Trump administration — and show the backlash that would result if things got even more imperial.
“If they subvert the election results next year,” Levin said, “you’re going to want some kind of response that doesn’t allow society to move on.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to move on from the shutdown. When convenient, it blames Democrats for agencies getting defunded; otherwise, it funds what it wants and cuts off what it doesn’t, with little complaint from Republicans on the Hill.
What president would want to swear off that power in the future? If Democrats win back power in a few years, would they really listen to “No Kings” and return to Jimmy Carter mode?
Notable
- Elsewhere in Semafor, Burgess Everett chronicles the “stupid” phase of the shutdown. “Most of my constituency back in Texas doesn’t know the government is shut down, except for delays in air traffic,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
- In the Wall Street Journal, Josh Dawsey captures Republican joy at how little opposition Trump faces. “Steve Bannon, the influential Trump ally, likened Congress to the Duma, the Russian assembly that is largely ceremonial.”
- In the Boston Review, Jedediah Britton-Purdy and David Pozen ask what exactly America is living through: “The United States will remain lost in political time, with no assurance of a lasting majority for democracy itself.”