The Senate Democrats who helped Republicans pass Donald Trump’s enabling act, and their defenders within the media, make various assertions about why they did what they did, why it was the best of bad alternatives, etc.

Their rationalizations all tinker with the same theme: That a shutdown was certain to unfold in a predictable way, and Democrats were destined to lose it. Therefore, the wisest course of action was to stand down and hope the courts rein in Trump. That’s what Chuck Schumer says. That’s what his supporters say. Here, Josh Barro peers into the future and asserts that Republicans don’t care about public opinion and will never cave, which means Democrats eventually would have.

Republicans are not going to [blink] because they won’t be especially bothered by a government shutdown, and they will know that Democrats care more about ending it than they do.

Usually, a party might want to end a shutdown for a few reasons. One is that the shutdown is hampering the government’s ability to do things they care about. Another is that they care that shutdown might be unpopular and politically costly. Again: Neither of these concerns applies to Republicans today. Trump is currently in the process of starting pointless trade wars that stand to tank both the economy and his approval ratings, and seems unfazed by that prospect — why would he be worried that Republicans have lost a “blame” game about a shutdown that would be far in the rearview mirror by the next federal election?.

There is, in reality, ample historical evidence that Republicans are sensitive to public opinion and willing to cave under certain circumstances. Even under Trump. Even in this Trump presidency. If Republicans thought a shutdown was a surefire winner for them, they certainly could have engineered one. Every government shutdown has ended when the party the public blames for the shutdown relents, and stops doing or demanding the thing that precipitated it. You only lash out at critics, and stipulate that Republicans are suddenly indifferent to public opinion, when you’re a bit embarrassed by your own lack of grit. Why didn’t we leave it all on the field? Because, stupid, we were destined to lose.

But the truth is nobody knows. Not Barro, not Schumer.

And not me!

Those of us spoiling for a fight didn’t have perfect foresight either. Being stridently certain of the future is a dangerous game.¹

I was and remain deeply uncertain of whether congressional Democrats could have won the fight for public opinion, but the fight for public opinion was the whole thing. The beginning and end of the story is that pro-conflict liberals and conflict-averse liberals have different risk tolerances. Schumer et al want you to believe that the decision to fold was rooted in grown-up reckoning with factual certainties rather than a kind of softness.

So that’s that, and in some sense it’s all behind us now. Schumer and Senate Democrats will have to contend with their voters, and the Trump opposition will press forward with a more limited set of options.

But it’s worth following the logic of the Democrats’ post hoc rationalizations—taking them at their word, for the sake of argument. If the courts are the whole ballgame—or, more to the point, if Democrats really believed the courts are the whole ballgame—what Democratic opposition tactics would that militate for? Are Democrats doing what you’d expect a party to be doing if they were putting all of their faith the legal process? The answer will not surprise you!

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SIMPLE TWIST OF FAIT

It was clear Trump would attempt an authoritarian seizure of power through a series of faits accompli. As far as I can tell, nobody anticipated exactly how he would go about this—deputizing his top campaign donor to commit a spree of crimes against the state—but the broad strokes should have been clear to anyone who read Project 2025.

What Trump and Elon Musk have actually done is significantly more lawless than Project 2025. That effort was fairly professionalized, at least compared to DOGE; it’s easy to get a bunch of Ivy League-trained lawyers to paint juuuust inside the lines of constitutionality, or within the realm of constitutional ambiguity or contestation. But much was still foreseeable. Long before the election, I knew, and wrote² and said, that, among other things, Trump and his top officials would do things they knew would likely be overturned in court, but that more or less couldn’t be undone.

DOGE or no DOGE, Trump intended to fire thousands of government workers with civil-service protections, some of them were going to sue, but even in victory, many fired workers would have already moved on by the time they were vindicated.

It’s like the physics concept of entropy, deployed against the republic. If you pour a cup of salt then a cup of pepper into a bowl and mix the bejesus out of it, it’s done. A judge can order you to re-sort the salt from the pepper, but you’re not going to be able to. It will not work to undo the steps by reversing them. And you can’t practically re-sort the mixture grain by grain.

Stopping Trump from breaking the law in this way was always going to be a matter of getting public opinion on to the side of containment. Instead, Democrats relinquished the most potent tool at their disposal to move public opinion, and now say the shrewder plan is to wait for the courts.

If they really believed that, I think they’d behave differently than they are. The strongest indication that risk-aversion and fear, rather than dispassionate analysis, are driving the decision-making lies in their lack of preparation for the high likelihood that judges find themselves powerless to enforce their orders.

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ORDER AND THE COURT

It’s worth remembering that Schumer’s initial public position wasn’t that courts would have to sort this out—it was that Democrats had the power to steady and right-size the Trump administration, and would use it.

“[L]egislation in the Senate requires 60 votes and Senate Democrats will use our votes to help steady the ship for the American people in these turbulent times,” he wrote in February.

But let’s stipulate that it was just a bluff, or that he had a sincere change of heart. ...