Why Are Democrats So Stubborn About Shutting Down the Government?

As I write this essay, the United States has survived through the twenty-first day of the Schumer Shutdown as the Democrats voted at least eleven times to prolong the federal government shutdown. Democrats also voted against funding the military, causing the Pentagon to search for enough funding to pay the service members. After the tenth vote, Josh Hammer published the following at The Daily Signal. 

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 things, the extremism that people turned their back in ’24, and that’s how we kind of came up short.” …

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 as the more blameworthy side….

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….