FIGHTING THE GOVERNMENT-CLOSING DEMOCRATIC FILIBUSTER. In the last week or so, there have been two conflicting interpretations of what is going on among the Senate Democrats who are using the filibuster to block the reopening of the government.
The first view was that the Democrats’ resolve to keep the government closed would soften after Tuesday’s elections. The thinking was that Democrats used the shutdown to show their base that they were tough and would stand up to President Donald Trump. In addition, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who enraged the base by allowing the passage of a GOP spending bill earlier this year, could fend off a primary challenge by bragging that he had engineered the longest shutdown in history as part of his anti-Trump campaign. So after the election, the thinking went, Democrats would realize they had gotten all they could out of the shutdown and relent on allowing the government to reopen.
The second view emerged on Election Day, when it was clear Democrats were winning important races in New Jersey and Virginia. They also won in the New York mayoral race and the California redistricting initiative, but those victories in single-party jurisdictions didn’t say much about Democratic strength against Republicans. The post-election view was that the New Jersey and Virginia results showed the Democratic base was happy with the party’s obstructionism on Capitol Hill and wanted to see more of it. Therefore, Democrats would keep the blockade in place.
Now, there are reports that some Senate Democrats are indeed feeling emboldened to keep the shutdown going. Voters obviously did not punish them for shutting down the government, despite the hardship it has caused, so why change now?
If they do press on, if they do keep the government closed, Democrats will be acting with confidence that comes from a number of polls that show more people blame Republicans for the shutdown than blame the Democrats, who actually caused the impasse. Two polls out just before the election, one from the Washington Post and the other from NBC News, both found that more people blamed Republicans for the shutdown than blamed Democrats.
That seems odd, given the plain facts of the case: Democrats are filibustering the government-opening bill. But it makes more sense after looking at media coverage of the standoff. In a new report, the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters studied broadcast newscasts for October and noted that “the big three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) have hammered both congressional Republicans and President Trump with a wall of negative shutdown coverage, while largely shielding Democrats from blame for the now-historic gridlock.”
“Coverage across all three networks was conspicuously vague about how the shutdown had even occurred,” the MRC report continued. “There were only 12 instances in which any of the three outlets hinted that Senate Democrats had voted repeatedly against a continuing resolution.” Just informally reading print coverage of the shutdown, it’s interesting to note that many articles discussed the internal Republican debate on ending the filibuster but did not specifically say the reason for the debate is that Senate Democrats are employing the filibuster to block a government funding bill that has majority support.
So what now? Republicans can’t make media coverage any more fair or accurate. But they can work harder to get the facts out. To do that, perhaps Trump should stop outsourcing the handling of the shutdown to Republican leaders of the House and Senate.
If Trump were to launch a presidential full-court press — announcements in the Oval Office or White House briefing room every day, multiple times a day — he could stress a very clear, simple message. The basics: No. 1, here is the bill to fund the government that the House has passed. No. 2, it is a straight bill, no tricks, identical to one agreed to by Democrats just this year. No. 3, Senate Democrats are using the filibuster to stop it. No. 4, the president and the GOP will negotiate the Democrats’ concerns, but only after they reopen the government. No. 5, everything depends on lifting the filibuster.
Each day, the White House would treat the situation like the crisis it is about to become, with the president pressing Democrats to do the right thing. It might not work, but at least the GOP position would be clearly, prominently argued every day by the Republican Party’s best communicator.