Democrats Still Haven't Learned Any Lessons

By Josh Hammer

On Thursday, Senate Democrats voted for the 10th time to prolong the federal government shutdown. They also voted against funding the military, thereby necessitating that the Pentagon initiate some innovative accounting in order to ensure service members are paid on time.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., defended his caucus's latest vote, opining, "It's always been unacceptable to Democrats to do the defense bill without other bills that have so many things that are important to the American people in terms of health care, in terms of housing, in terms of safety." But to most Americans, such tendentious bloviating falls on deaf ears. Most commonsense Americans understand that there is no reason paying America's warriors should be held hostage to arcane debates over housing policy.

As Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., one of three Senate Democrats who joined Republicans on Thursday in support of the defense appropriations bill, put it earlier this week: "You know, if you're thinking about winning the election, now, that's all going to come down to seven or eight states. ... And a lot of the things, the extremism that people turned their back in '24, and that's how we kind of came up short."

It's wise advice. But Fetterman is likely to pay for being such a rare voice of (relative) reason within the party with an impending bruising Senate primary contest.

Why exactly are Democrats, who control neither chamber of Congress nor the presidency, continuing to insist on a protracted shutdown battle? It's a more complex question than it ought to be. But the basic disagreement amounts to one over expiring Obamacare subsidies and the scope of Medicaid coverage -- pertaining, to no small extent, to illegal aliens.

In short, then, air traffic control operations are suffering from a potentially dangerous shortage, America's beautiful national parks are understaffed, and service members could go without pay -- all, seemingly, because Democrats think more taxpayer dollars should go toward subsidizing the health care of illegal aliens.

This is an astonishingly weak negotiating position. Minority parties completely out of power typically do not get what they want during high-profile Beltway budgetary standoffs or shutdown fights, and there is very little reason to expect Republicans to cave. As the shutdown goes on, moreover, the polling on which side is more to blame seems to be gradually shifting toward Democrats.

It is far from obvious what exactly Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., expect to accomplish as the shutdown barrels ahead toward its third week. They are not going to prevail -- and the longer it goes on, the worse political shape they will find themselves in.

Democrats seem to be unable to avoid tripping all over themselves.

On the issue of illegal immigration, the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to their agenda. A Harvard/Harris poll earlier this month revealed that 56% of registered voters support deporting all illegal aliens, and 78% support deporting criminal illegal aliens. On the question of taxpayer subsidization of the genital mutilation and chemical castration procedures often euphemistically referred to as "gender-affirming care," another culture war sticking point, another recent poll showed that 66% of Americans are in opposition. The polling on biological male participation in women's sports is even starker.

Illegal immigration and gender radicalism are perhaps the two least popular issues right now for Democrats. Yet they are arguably the two issues most at the forefront of the current Beltway standoff -- or at least the debate over the scope of taxpayer funding is.

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist, famously taught that a battle is won before it is fought by choosing the terrain on which it is fought. President Donald Trump, the decades-long branding and marketing genius, already has a keen knack for framing issues in such a way -- the art of the 80-20 issue, as this column has called it. And Democrats seem all too eager to make his job easier by choosing the side whose loss is a foregone conclusion.

What gives?

A rational political party interested in self-preservation and electoral success would certainly take a different approach. Such a party would ditch the post-2008 obsession with identity politics and wokeism and revert to the Clinton-era message of economic growth and cultural centrism.

That Democratic leadership is so woefully incapable of doing this, even following Trump's resounding triumph last November across all the major swing states, indicates that the party is not currently guided by rational calculations. Democrats today are guided not by sober empiricism but by fanciful ideology.

The biggest reason that Trump prevailed in the contentious 2016 Republican presidential primary and has won so much popular support since is that he had little use for abstract ideology. He saw the American people as they are, and he sought to serve them.

Democrats would be wise to follow suit.