It’s hard to write clearly when you’re being flooded with new information. But here goes. I’ve heard people arguing the “‘yes’ on cloture” argument, essentially saying, “don’t assume you can shut DOGE down, undo the damage. It’s not a silver bullet.” I can only speak for myself, but if anyone is thinking, based on the arguments I’ve made, that this is a silver bullet and if Democrats just do this we can shut this whole thing down, I haven’t been clear. I will further say that while the things I’ve written over the last week or so make it pretty clear where I stand on this, I have several times over the last week had a hard think with myself: are you sure you’re right about this? I’m not sure I’d say this is a close call. But it’s a hard call, for me at least. Both options hold out possibilities of calamity and destruction I’ve never seriously contemplated before. That is simply where we are. I wish we weren’t here. But we are here.
As I’ve written, my ask would be, right out of the gate, “we’ll give you the keys, we’ll give you your bill, if we write down the DOGE plan for each department and agency. And we just do an up or down vote. If you can pass it through Congress, that’s all we ask.” (I’ve explained previously why I think this is a good idea.)
I think it is worth doing this if all it accomplishes is to bring the current destruction of the federal government more into the public eye, make it even more salient than it is right now. And by this what I mean is the evisceration for no reason of countless protections, services and programs that ordinary Americans rely on. I’d hope to accomplish significantly more than that. But even that is very important.
What if Democrats get “blamed”? Logic and the public opinion data I’m seeing don’t make this look as likely as some people seem to think. But what if they do? I really don’t think that’s that big a deal, frankly. I’m pretty confident that increasing the visibility and salience of what the White House is currently doing would hurt Republicans’ popularity even more. Do you think carving up Social Security is popular? I don’t. Education Department? Same. The VA? No. Maybe Democrats will get bruised up too. I don’t see that as anything like a deal killer. This is a vast public battle over the future of the Republic. I want to raise the visibility of things that I’m very confident, based on a lot of data, are very unpopular. I also think having your demand be that the party in the majority should simply vote on what it wants to do is a hard thing to argue against in American civic discourse. If you raise it and you get the public more against what’s happening, it’s an afterthought in my mind how people view the Democratic Party or its current leaders.
I put this forward as a sort of minimum outcome, a negative scenario, and I think it’s still pretty positive in terms of what I can see. What if Democrats do what I’ve described above for two weeks and then they just don’t have the stomach for it any longer and then they pull the plug? This is being presented as a big loss and humiliation. But who cares? Embarrassing? Sure. I guess. But who cares? A related argument is, there’s no end game. We start and we’re stuck because he won’t cave. I don’t really buy that as set in stone. But what if he doesn’t? This isn’t a pissing match. Democrats can always pull the plug.
Again, I’m arguing what I see as worst-case scenarios now. But I don’t think they materially makes things any worse than they are right now.
The other big bogey is this will accelerate the destruction. I’ve done some research on this. And some of the arguments I noted a few days ago — that shutdowns longer than 30 days give Musk new legal channels — don’t actually seem to be true. But the more general point is that I do not see much evidence they’re being held back now. Courts are slowing things down a bit here and there. In the cases where they’re forcing departments to unfire people the assumption is they’ll just do “reductions in force” (RIFs) — the legal process of downsizing. I don’t see the argument that the White House is being meaningfully restrained right now. The only big restraint is public opinion. And I do not see how that stops being operative in a shutdown.
I want to remind people of what I wrote a few days ago. The current executive orders explicitly say that the end game is a government the size of the shutdown size. So the endgame we’re currently heading toward, what they say they want and is current policy, is literally a permanent shutdown.
I know this has been a pretty dreary and negative post. I’m writing it for two reasons. First, I don’t want anyone to be unrealistic — certainly not based on anything I’ve written — about what that choice would mean. Second, I don’t believe the “bad outcomes” are that bad or meaningfully different from the situation we’re already in.
Have a great day.
