"As the Times columnist Ezra Klein observed, a shutdown also presented the Democrats with an opportunity to focus public attention on President Donald Trump's corruption, turning what had been a "diffuse crisis" into an "acute" one. In the end, the Democrats mostly oriented their demands toward health care-above all, the renewal of expiring Obamacare subsidies-as opposed to, say, prioritizing more abstract ultimatums related to creeping authoritarianism."
"What happened next, this time, was strange, and not uniformly validating for the Democrats' strategy. The shutdown became a big news story, of course, but didn't concentrate attention to the degree one might have expected-in no small part because, in Trump's Washington, there's always something else going on. Not enough pressure mounted on the Democrats to give in, either. Republicans tried to make them take difficult votes to reopen the government, but those attempts never really cut through;"
Senate Democrats forced a government shutdown on October 1st to extract policy concessions, primarily the renewal of expiring Obamacare subsidies. Earlier intra-party backlash had made capitulation politically costly, incentivizing a confrontational approach. The shutdown aimed to focus public attention on President Donald Trump's corruption and to pressure Republicans, but competing news and limited media narrative control diluted its impact. Republicans attempted tactical maneuvers to force difficult votes to reopen the government, yet those moves failed to generate decisive pressure. The health-care framing replaced broader constitutional or authoritarian alarms, yielding ambiguous political returns for Democrats.
Read at The New Yorker
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