When Winning Means Losing

The longest government shutdown in the history of the United States began in early October and lasted 44 days. Government shutdowns occur at the beginning of a fiscal year when Congress, the president, and both political parties fail to come to a consensus on the federal budget. During government shutdowns, all supposedly “non-essential” federal functions and employees are suspended. Unfortunately, because a vast number of federal employees and services rely on this funding legislation, these halts have the potential to spiral very quickly.

This most recent shutdown started when Republicans, who currently hold a congressional majority, proposed halting the renewal of government subsidies to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) entirely. This proposal faced immediate backlash from Democrats and was debated for days, with both sides refusing to budge. As a result, the fiscal year started without a conclusion on federal funding allocations, prompting the shutdown. However, just a few days ago, the Senate reached the 60-vote filibuster majority needed to pass the funding bill, when seven Senate Democrats and one independent broke with the Democratic caucus to vote for the budget. They did so with the knowledge that criticism would come, but determined amongst themselves that the shutdown wasn't worth the costs.

Debates about ending subsidies to the ACA have been ongoing since it was put into place nearly 15 years ago. At the backbone of the conservative argument against it is the national deficit—Republicans contend that funding the ACA is a form of unnecessary government spending that’s contributing to the national deficit and increasing federal debt. Moreover, particularly regarding medical aid, the GOP has always emphasized “personal responsibility,” or the idea that the people shouldn’t be reliant on the government for support, pushing the narrative that people who use these support systems are idle and do not support themselves. When Republicans started calling to add work requirements to Medicaid this year, Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin was quoted in a Politico article on Medicaid saying, “We don’t pay people in this country to be lazy.”

One of the major reasons why this concession was a huge mistake on the part of the Democrats is that the budget itself is ruinous. The ACA was passed under the Obama administration, and is an initiative that expands health insurance coverage and increases medical care accessibility, particularly for lower- and middle-class Americans. Multiple studies conducted by the State Health Access Data Assistance Center have found that over 15 years, the ACA has nearly halved the nation’s uninsured rate, while the US Department of the Treasury reports that nearly 50 million Americans have been covered by this act since 2014—four years after it was enacted. That’s one in seven U.S. residents—a shockingly high statistic. At the center of the budget deal the Republicans have now succeeded in pushing through is the abandonment of government subsidies to the ACA, raising healthcare costs for everyone using it. Almost everyone who uses the ACA is a low-income individual, making this all the more devastating. 

On top of the budget’s destructive implications for national medical support is the negative public perception of the Democratic Party. On October 30, ABC News found that not only was concern about the shutdown skyrocketing, but 45 percent of American adults blamed President Donald Trump and Republicans for it, as opposed to the 33 percent that blamed Democrats in Congress. This sharply contrasts what an October 9 Reuters poll found, where 63 percent of Americans placed the blame on Trump and an equal percent on Democrats. Public opinion was clearly shifting, with growing criticism of the GOP completely changing national perception of the shutdown. 

Unfortunately, this deal set all of that progress back. While many people were beginning to realize the GOP’s proposal was unreasonable and that the Republican party was causing the shutdown, they now see the Democrats as having had the power to end it all along. Democratic membership in Congress is already low, and all this did was further diminish the party’s power and image: it made Democrats look like they gave in to Republicans without leading to any lasting change, meaning that all the chaos created by the shutdown was meaningless.

This mistake is already being exploited by the GOP to deflect from national issues and scapegoat the Democratic Party. Trump’s response to the recently released Epstein files was that Democrats were “using the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax to try and deflect from their massive failures,” referring to the shutdown. Trump will likely continue weaponizing the crisis in an effort to discredit the Democratic Party while taking the spotlight off of his failures, and unfortunately, he will most likely succeed in his efforts. 

The Republicans hold a majority in both the House and the Senate, meaning that the only real power the Democrats hold in the current government is stalling this kind of vote. Giving that up not only represented a loss of legislative voice but also put short-term priorities over long-term ones. With this issue in particular, what was important for the Democrats to keep in mind was that the government shutdown would have been temporary. While it did have serious effects on air traffic, government services, and other federally guided sectors, even the GOP recognizes the need for federal services to be in function, and in one way or another, the shutdown would have come to a close. What’s not a temporary issue is the 50 million people who are now facing permanent loss of government subsidies to their healthcare support—the low- and middle-income persons who were reliant on this foundation that now have nothing to fall back on. That is the real impact of this decision, an impact which will be far more lasting yet just as devastating as what we saw during the shutdown.