The media and social media is in an uproar about the government shutdown, handicapping which party will prevail while the parties themselves play the usual blame game even as it is unclear the average person has noticed a thing so far.
As the Associated Press characterized it on Friday morning, “Hopes for a quick end to the government shutdown were fading Friday as Republicans and Democrats dug in for a prolonged fight and President Donald Trump readied plans to unleash layoffs and cuts across the federal government. Senators were headed back to the Capitol for another vote on government funding on the third day of the shutdown, but there has been no sign of any real progress toward ending their standoff. Democrats are demanding that Congress extend health care benefits, while Republicans are trying to wear them down with day after day of voting on a House-passed bill that would reopen the government temporarily, mostly at current spending levels.” Setting aside the failure to mention that Republicans in the Senate voted for the House bill and the government would remain open were it not for Democrats attempting to increase spending on healthcare, it’s a sadly accurate description. On Thursday, CNN’s Stephen Collinson assessed the situation from a win-lose perspective, beginning by noting, “It’s too early to blink, but the pressure is slowly beginning to rise. The government shutdown drama is still in its opening act with Democrats and Republicans each heaping blame on the other side. And despite deepening partisan bitterness in Washington, nothing has changed the equation that led to the impasse: Republicans and Democrats both saw a greater political advantage in letting the government close than in keeping it open.” In his view, the “White House adopted a ruthless position, threatening mass firings of federal workers and halting billions of dollars in public funds to humiliate Democratic leaders. Democrats, meanwhile, hammered their key claim that Trump will make health care more expensive for millions.” Admittedly, “this is a tough crisis to call” because “Democrats, who advocate using the government to advance the common good, effectively voted to shut it down with the use of the Senate 60-vote filibuster on Tuesday night. This, after they spent eight months accusing Trump of destroying the federal machine. But Republicans, who are devoted to smaller government, voted to keep federal operations purring. It was a little disorientating to see White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insist: ‘The American people want the government reopened.’”
Politicians are, perhaps needless to say, busy politicking. President Donald Trump, while advocating for opening the government, sees this an opportunity to enact both his agenda and make trouble for his opponents, simultaneously promising more reductions in government workers beyond the 300,000 fired, retired, or laid off since he retook office along with the shuttering of entire departments and either rescinding or slowing funding for government projects in blue states. This includes $18 billion for the new Hudson Tunnel in New York, $2.1 billion for infrastructure projects in Chicago, and half a billion for a powerline in Minnesota with more on the way. As the President himself put it on Truth Social, ““I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity. They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” “There could be firings and that’s their fault,” he said in an interview with One America News released last Thursday. “I mean, we could cut projects that they wanted, favorite projects, and they’d be permanently cut.” For his part, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has refused to vote to keep the government open despite privately telling former Obama official Van Jones that a shutdown was a terrible idea, not surprisingly, bemoaned the President’s strategy. “Trump’s so-called ‘maximum pain’ plan isn’t hurting Democrats — it’s hurting American families,” he said in a statement last week. “He’s snatching paychecks, threatening jobs, and deliberately inflicting suffering on working people just to score petty political points.” It was Senator Bernie Sanders, however, who might’ve provided the most hyperbolic description of the current state of affairs when he likened it to the worst crisis the country has faced since the Civil War (I guess outside of January 6?), telling MSNBC host Chris Hayes, “we are living in an unprecedentedly dangerous moment, maybe the worst crisis in America literally since the Civil War. You have a president who is acting unconstitutionally and illegally.” He continued, laying out the purported reason for the impasse, “They are saying it is their way or the highway. Right. And that is not acceptable. And I want everybody to understand that if we do not make changes and fight back effectively, you’re going to see 15 million Americans lose their health insurance to the cuts in Medicaid and the ACA. According to studies, 50,000 Americans die each year. That’s what’s at stake.”
While we certainly have reason to doubt those numbers given they claim people are going to die whatever Republicans do, this is primarily a battle over spending, one likely to occur over and over again for the foreseeable future. In this case, Democrats are demanding the reinstatement of some $1.5 trillion in healthcare spending and funding for National Public Radio. Republicans, in contrast, are arguing that this funding would go primarily to illegal aliens, we don’t have the money anyway given the deficit is likely to approach two trillion this year even with hundreds of billions of unexpected and underappreciated revenues from tariffs, and further discussions about all of this should be had in the context of the full spending bill that will be debated over the next two months. Though Democrats strenuously dispute the claim that these benefits will be used by illegal aliens, even CNN recently acknowledged, “That’s not to say there aren’t kernels of truth behind their claims, and the issue is complicated. Medicaid dollars do, in some situations, end up paying health care costs for those in the country without documentation as a matter of longstanding federal law. But the GOP’s political strategy to cast Democrats as holding government funding hostage over the issue rests on a rather Machiavellian and factually challenged effort to demonize migrants.” What are these so-called factual challenges to demonize migrants, however? First, no one disputes that illegal immigrants receive free treatment at emergency rooms, hence the reference to “longstanding federal law.” Second, CNN itself goes on to openly admit that President Joe Biden arbitrarily and improperly categorized many illegal aliens as asylum seekers or granted them temporary protected status, giving them access to even more benefits. As Speaker of the House Mike Johnson put it, “Joe Biden used executive orders, and he expanded benefits, health care to illegal aliens in his four-year term. That was an outrageous violation of the existing federal law and of the principles of good stewardship.” Because of these designations, they are currently eligible for coverage, or in CNN’s words, “would be eligible for these programs under the Democrats’ shutdown-ending proposal,” meaning both those who are here illegally and those we might call here improperly will receive benefits under their plans. Despite this, CNN somehow managed to square this circle by claiming maybe this group should have been considered illegal aliens under a fair application of the law, but they aren’t because the law wasn’t applied correctly; therefore they’re technically legal somehow and Republicans are arguing in bad faith, as in “saying these migrants should be considered ‘illegal’ – even if Republicans genuinely believe that” and “to the extent Republicans want to treat them as illegal, they could take other steps to try to strip them of legal status. Unless and until they do, though, these people have legal status under US law and aren’t ‘illegal aliens.’”
Republicans, however, likely have a much better argument in the good faith department. After all, as even CNN admits in the very same article, every Democrat Presidential candidate in 2019 including future President Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris went on record claiming they would extend healthcare coverage to illegal immigrants. “Don’t let the Democrats lie to you,” Republican Representative Pete Stauber of Minnesota posted on X last week along with a video of the moment. “In a 2019 debate, every Democrat candidate raised their hand in support of taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants. Now, they have shut down the government over it.” Speaker Johnson noted that one of those candidates went on to become President, the other Vice President. “Those hands included Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Now, what did they do? Did they follow through on that promise? Yeah, they absolutely did.” At the time, CNN reported on the moment itself, “Democrats want to offer healthcare for illegal immigrants. Here’s what it means,” and yet they are now fact checking that same reality as false, acting as though it’s unfair to take the Democrats at their own words on the issue or as usual these days, pretending the world began on January 20, 2025 when President Trump retook office. Regardless of their original coverage, a headline immediately before the shutdown read “Fact check: Trump falsely claims Democrats want to give healthcare to ‘illegal aliens’ in government shutdown battle.” If anyone doubts that is truly their intention or claims it was only said at a debate and didn’t actually happen, consider that progressive states are already extending Obamacare, Medicaid, and Medicare to illegal aliens despite federal law preventing them from doing so. California, Washington, Oregon, and DC provide full coverage. Illinois, New York, and Minnesota provide coverage under certain circumstances. All do so under an accounting gimmick which claims that only state money is used to provide care for the undocumented. Yes, their claim is that the majority of the program is funded federally and the program itself wouldn’t exist without federal dollars, but somehow, they are using only state money for this purpose and this purpose only. Given that everyone knows money is fungible, everyone should know this is a total fraud, and yet the media game continues.
At the same time, one has to wonder if anyone outside the government, the media, and political junkies like myself care at all when large percentages of the government are still open? At the Department of Defense now War, 406,000 civilians are on the job along with the entire military, albeit unfortunately with delayed pay, at the Department of Homeland Security 95% are still on the job, at the Department of Justice it’s 90%, at the Food and Drug Administration it’s 86%, and at the CDC it’s about a third. According to the BBC, approximately 60% of the total workforce is still performing their job functions. This is because many government functions are considered essential and continue operating regardless of the shutdown, while others funded by fees or sources of revenue outside the appropriations process. Though I don’t mean to minimize the impact in certain areas or on certain people, most will not notice any difference in their daily lives – at least for a little while. If this changes, the Democrats might be in a better position, but until it does, it’s hard to see how a shutdown no one cares about over money we don’t have getting spent on people who are in the country illegally or improperly and one that empowers President Trump far more than it does his opponents is going to end in their favor.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 