The Hunger Games

Democrats are willing to endure a shutdown to bring critical attention to horrific Republican policies.

Image courtesy of Yahoo Finance

With the government officially shut down and the parties now jockeying for position and messaging, it’s helpful to have a clear understanding—and realistic set of expectations—for what’s ahead.

To wrap our heads around this, it’s helpful to compare the Democratic strategy to a hunger strike.

For the last eight months Congressional Democrats have basically been held captive. Their jailers in the White House and in the GOP-controlled Congress hold all the power, yes, but more importantly they have repeatedly broken the rules, with a big assist from a captured Supreme Court.

Now the Republicans have made clear they are willing to hurt millions of vulnerable Americans by allowing Obamacare premiums to spike. This comes after having already allowed Medicaid to collapse by defunding it by nearly a trillion dollars.

Democrats have responded with the only real power they have: by refusing to lend their votes. After all, why play along when the other side inflicts devastation whenever and wherever it wants?

In a hunger strike, the prisoners also refuse to cooperate in any way, even to the point of refusing to eat. This obviously inflicts a great deal of pain on the strikers themselves, but it dramatically highlights how extreme things have gotten inside the prison.

The pain gets worse before it gets better

Like a hunger strike, a government shutdown is painful. And authoritarian jailers, who do not like having their abuses publicly spotlighted, try to break the strike by inflicting even more pain. “If you don’t eat, no one else will either!” they might threaten. “We will double your sentences and put you in solitary! We will punish your families!”

Hunger strikers know that under such an imbalance, the only thing they have left are their principles. As the ones with no power, they have to accept that the other side will continue to raise the stakes, increasing the pain to test the will of the strikers, fracture their support among other prisoners, and turn the public against them—even though it is the jailers who can end this at any time by acting humanely.

As threatened, the White House responded to the shutdown with even more punishments. To no one’s surprise, the moves were targeted against blue states and cities and against Democratic priorities in the federal government.

Yesterday, Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) withheld $18 billion in transit improvement funds for New York City that were earmarked for the Hudson River Tunnel and the Second Avenue Subway. This freezing of funds is now pending “a review” to ensure that money is not “flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles,” a top official said Wednesday.

To underscore the political nature of the rescission, Vought also threatened to cancel clean energy funding totaling $8 billion for blue states only. Vought tweeted,

Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled. More info to come from @ENERGY.

The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA

Notably, every single state listed voted for Kamala Harris in the last election.

We all know these moves are a reaction to the shutdown and comprise wholly unconstitutional and illegal impoundments of congressionally appropriated funds. But ironically, they also demonstrate exactly why a shutdown is justified.

After all, why should the Democrats agree to keep the government open for another seven weeks to negotiate a “budget” if the White House can later refuse to honor it? What’s to stop the OMB from doing exactly the same thing with New York City transit funds and blue state energy projects even after a budget is passed and signed into law?

An end to illegal rescissions is one of Democrats’ primary demands, since the Supreme Court appears completely willing to allow the White House to continue to violate the law, despite clear and previously unanimous precedent against impoundment of funds.

Trump even suggested to reporters, with typical ambiguity, that he would target Democrats for layoffs. “Well, the Democrats want to shut it down, so when you shut it down, you have to do layoffs,” Trump declared. “So, we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected, and the Democrats—they’re gonna be Democrats.”

As with many of Trump’s statements, it wasn’t clear if he was actually suggesting that only Democrats would be laid off, or that Democrats are “gonna be Democrats.”

As if to remove any doubt around the wholly partisan nature of the renewed attacks on federal agencies, as well as to highlight the direct role of Project 2025 in the execution of these plans, Trump posted on Truth Social this morning:

I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.

None of this is legal. But as Andrew Egger of The Bulwark notes, the GOP had a clear opportunity to foist all the blame on the Democrats for the shutdown but is now pursuing a fairly boneheaded strategy, one Egger calls the “cartoon supervillain” shutdown approach. Egger observed,

The White House had suddenly decided—ten months into Trump’s term—that these contracts needed more Department of Transportation scrutiny. And, ah, wouldn’t you know it? That scrutiny can’t take place while the government is shut down. So Vought decided to put the whole thing on ice for the time being. Better safe than sorry—New Yorkers wouldn’t want a woke subway tunnel.

It was a blatantly illegal and nakedly transparent attempt to put the screws on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a fact Vice President JD Vance didn’t bother to hide during the White House press briefing yesterday. “I’m sure that Russ is heartbroken about the fact that he is unable to give certain things to certain constituencies,” the vice president smirked.

Many Americans in the center could view the deliberate political targeting of blue cities and states and the shuttering of “Democrat agencies” as loathsome and un-American. Further, the halting of big infrastructure projects in blue cities and states could actually hurt working class Trump voters, who provide much of the labor on the affected projects.

The White House’s political targeting also proves that not only is this regime wholly lawless but that it will act with absolute impunity and for purely vindictive, political reasons, whether the government is shut down or not.

That’s not democracy. It’s the exertion of autocratic power.

A strike is only as strong as its weakest-willed members

When prisoners go on hunger strikes, no one wants it to go on for long. The suffering is intense, and the public doesn’t want the strikers to grow seriously ill, or worse to die from lack of nourishment. They just want the jailers to relent.

During this government shutdown, it’s somewhat comforting to know that ICE and other federal authorities in our cities will also go unpaid. But so too will many hardworking essential government workers, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck. And poor families who depend on federal nutritional assistance will not be able to collect their benefits and feed their children.

That will create enormous pressure on Senate Democrats to give in.

Given this, we need to be clear-eyed about what we hope to achieve. Like hunger strikes, shutdowns can’t go on forever. We already know that there are weaker-willed senators who have peeled away, and more may follow. Three of them—John Fetterman (D-PA), Angus King (I-ME) and Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-NV) voted to fund the government, and it would take just five more Democrats in the Senate to cave for the GOP to reopen the government on their terms alone.

We’ll urge all the rest to hold firm, of course. But ultimately the point of this shutdown isn’t to win every concession or die trying. It’s to bring national attention to the GOP’s devastating cuts and demonstrate that Democrats will do all they can to protect vulnerable Americans.

That takes time and consistent messaging, but on this front Democrats are already winning. Millions more are now aware that their Obamacare premiums may soon double in the coming months. Already, social media is filling up with examples of huge increases in premiums, all in anticipation of the end of the subsidies. Democratic officials such as Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) are sounding the alarm and posting receipts.

From their side, we are unsurprisingly seeing a barrage of misinformation and scapegoating. The GOP’s primary talking point appears to be that the Democrats want $1.5 trillion to provide healthcare to “illegal aliens.” Of course, nothing in the bill to extend the ACA subsidies (which are not even available to undocumented immigrants) or in the entire Medicaid program (which reimburses hospitals for eligible patients) provides any direct payments to “illegal aliens.” But that hasn’t stopped the GOP from spreading the lie repeatedly to the public.

The task ahead

Democrats need to respond to these lies, certainly, and they are. But the main focus must remain on the harm and pain the GOP will inflict on millions of families if the Obamacare subsidies expire.

As things stand, Republicans will not accept any conditions on their stop-gap funding measure, including extension of the Obamacare subsidies. Meanwhile, Democrats do not want to give up the only leverage they have to prevent the subsidies from expiring.

We can all help by using the period of this shutdown to draw attention to the looming catastrophe of rising insurance premiums. There’s a reason Democrats were willing to risk the government’s closure to prevent these from spiking, and we need to help spread the word.

If the GOP somehow force-feeds the hunger strikers and causes the government to reopen—yet still allows those Obamacare subsidies to expire at the end of this year— we will need to focus the anger of the electorate squarely upon the party responsible. The last time the GOP even threatened to dismantle Obamacare, they were swept out of power in the 2018 Blue Wave midterm elections.

The GOP appears to have memory-holed that outcome, but Democrats have not. Indeed, they are banking on the same voter fury over healthcare to build the momentum they need to win.