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Meyerson on TAP

The Democrats’ shutdown challenge: How long must the hurt continue?

Balancing constituents’ immediate income cessation against constituents’ long-term health insurance cessation

The American Federation of Government Employees is in an understandable pickle. None of the union’s roughly 800,000 members, federal government civilian employees all, have been paid since the government shut down on October 1. Even more understandably, given the Republicans’ long-standing war against government, the union is a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, though one that criticizes Democrats when their policies run afoul of members’ interests.

So it couldn’t have come as a surprise when AFGE President Everett Kelley released a statement yesterday calling on both parties—but chiefly, the Democrats—to end the shutdown. “Both political parties have made their point,” he began,

and still there is no clear end in sight. Today, I’m making mine: It’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures, and no gamesmanship. Put every single federal worker back on the job with full back pay—today."

Those closing four words—“with full back pay”—are directed, of course, at Donald Trump and the Republicans, who have threatened to withhold workers’ back pay once the shutdown is done. But calling to “pass a clean continuing resolution” is directed at the Democrats, who have opposed passing a continuing resolution unless it restores the Medicaid funding that was terminated in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and redirected to tax cuts for the wealthy. Passing a “clean continuing resolution” is the Republicans’ position.

Those Medicaid cuts, which will effectively deny health insurance to millions of Americans, will go into effect on Saturday. Democrats have made the restoration of those funds the clear prerequisite for their voting for a continuing resolution, arguing that Republicans will only support that restoration, and those to other federal health insurance programs, if forced to by the shutdown.

It’s never been all that clear what the Democrats’ endgame is: using the sticker shock that Americans will begin seeing next week to put more pressure on the Republicans to cave? That sticker shock will surely affect Republicans and independents as well as Democrats, though whether that will suffice to compel the Republicans to deal (and compel Trump to abide by the deal) is far from clear, and probably a long shot. If there’s a political price the GOP must pay for these cuts, it won’t come due until the midterm election, a full year from now.

The problem for AFGE is that its members are paying the price for the shutdown right now. No doubt, some of its members believe hanging tough is worth the price. After Kelley released his statement, one federal employee responded, “For what it’s worth, this anonymous federal worker thinks that the AFGE statement is bullshit as it sets us up to be used as pawns for future shutdown fights.”

That said, it’s highly unlikely that Kelley would have released his statement unless he had reason to think his members were growing anxious, and in some cases, desperate. And the problem the Democrats face in the current standoff is how to weigh these distinct forms of pain: immediate to a known universe of, mainly, political allies; or long-term to a broader universe of, most importantly, swing voters.

The administration’s announcement that, come Saturday, it will stop paying for food stamps, on which 42 million Americans, many of them children, rely, however, gives the Democrats a way to make clear the Republicans’ responsibility for the immediate infliction of harm on a population that engenders more public sympathy than government workers. Every Democratic state attorney general has sued the administration to release the funds it’s been legally required to set aside to fund food stamps when other funds are not available, and a number of congressional Republicans have made clear that this particular funding cutoff will lead to a battle they can’t win. This may or may not lead to a Democratic victory in their campaign to make clear just how destructive the MAGA Republicans truly are, but if it does, it will come a lot quicker than a Republican reversal on Medicaid funding. I suspect there are a lot of AFGE members who hope such a victory will suffice to produce a resumption of government spending.

– HAROLD MEYERSON

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