While Democrats may be hoping to use the ongoing government shutdown to get Republicans to relent on their refusal to extend Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, one analyst is cautioning Democrats to not allow President Donald Trump to use the shutdown to advance his own goals of amassing power.
In a Thursday essay for the New Yorker, Susan Glasser — the wife of New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker — wrote that Democrats should "be careful what [they] wish for" in hoping that Americans will blame Republicans for the shutdown. She argued that Trump is already exploiting it in order to continue his "undoing of the Constitution’s checks and balances."
Glasser argued that the last government shutdown, which lasted for roughly a month in late 2018 and early 2019, taught Trump what he can get away with when Congress is out of session and federal agencies are shuttered. She noted that Trump had ended that first shutdown by relenting on border wall funding he insisted Congress appropriate, and that Democrats celebrated after reopening the government without caving to Trump's demands.
However, the New Yorker columnist pointed out that in his second term, Trump has claimed emergency powers to do everything from impose tariffs without congressional input, deploy the U.S. military to American cities and seal the Southern border, among other things. And she observed that Trump is banking on the Republican supermajority Supreme Court to not intervene and allow him unchecked emergency powers in spite of various lawsuits challenging his authority to claim an emergency. She posited that while Trump felt constrained by Congress in his first administration, he has a compliant Republican majority eager to act as a rubber stamp in his second term.
"The Trump 1.0 shutdown, in other words, was the precursor event for the Trump 2.0 power grab," Glasser wrote. "So no wonder that Trump is going big with this shutdown: as far as he’s concerned, there’s only upside. Who knows what additional authority he’ll have seized from Congress by the time it’s over?"
Trump has chiefly sought to carry out mass firings of federal workers during the current shutdown, even though a shutdown typically only allows for furloughs of workers, who are then given back pay for any days of missed work once their agencies reopen. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought has suggested he'll release plans for which agencies will see permanent firings in the coming days, and unions representing federal workers have promised to challenge the OMB's authority in court should it follow through on its threat. Glasser wrote that the administration is likely going to plow ahead regardless of whether or not their actions are deemed legal.
"Such layoffs would also be an unprecedented response to a shutdown. But this is Trump 2.0; where another President might hear words such as 'illegal' and 'unprecedented' as a warning sign, for Trump they are practically an invitation to act," she wrote. "He hardly needs an invitation, anyway."
"The mood in the Oval Office today when it comes to constraints of any kind can be best summed up by a photo that Trump posted of his pre-shutdown meeting on Monday with Democratic leaders, complete with two strategically placed TRUMP 2028 hats sitting atop the Resolute desk. Subtle, he’s not," she continued. "There’s a theme here to his entire second term: the Constitution — what’s that?"
Click here to read Glasser's full essay (subscription required).