After watching the messaging coming out of Washington on the brink of the government shutdown, I offered a dissent to its narrowness at New York:

There is a well-worn point of view in progressive politics that ultimately the material interests of voters are all that matters. Cultural issues are “distractions,” would-be opiates of the masses. Concerns about the Constitution and the laws or the functioning of democracy are pointy-headed insider elitist hobbyhorses. What many “economic populists” took away from the 2024 elections is that Americans were happy to restore to power a convicted felon who contemptuously rejected any limitations on his power because they vaguely remembered the economy doing well during his first term and Democrats failed to offer them more money in their pockets. The lesson going forward was that a majority of voters were okay with a little fascism if it meant lower grocery and gasoline prices.

Donald Trump is now well on his way to breaking his campaign promises about living costs, and his party will likely pay a price for that in next year’s midterms. But he’s breaking a lot of other things as well, and Democrats are fundamentally divided as to whether their alarm over his wild power grabs and generally authoritarian demeanor is something they should prominently share with voters. It is not a theoretical issue, as it happens — it’s at the center of how Democrats should explain their position on the federal-government shutdown that began at midnight on September 30.

Democrats clearly do understand the need for unity during the shutdown crisis. Their divisions last time stopgap-spending authority ran out in March left them looking weak and completely ineffectual. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose caucus had the rare power to deny Republicans a stopgap bill via a filibuster, talked tough and then folded when a shutdown grew nigh, enraging Democratic activists and creating the appearance that Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries weren’t on the same page.

This time around they’re united going into the shutdown, with their position on what it would take to earn their votes to reopen the government contained in legislation that covers the waterfront of Democratic concerns. They are demanding an extension of Obamacare premium subsidies that expire at the end of the year (left out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act because a critical mass of Republicans hate anything associated with Obamacare); the repeal of key Medicare cuts enacted in the OBBBA; the cancellation of arguably illegal clawbacks of already-appropriated federal funds via rescissions; and restraints on future executive-branch encroachment of congressional spending authority. So Democrats are in theory placing equal weight on popular government benefits Republicans are seeking to cut, and on the administration’s authoritarian conduct.

But if you look at the issues Democratic voices are emphasizing, it’s all about money, money, money. The Democratic National Committee’s talking points on the shutdown are 100 percent focused on health-care provisions:

“At midnight tonight, Donald Trump and Republicans will be solely responsible for the government shutdown because they are hellbent on making health care more expensive for working families. Trump would rather raise health care costs for more than 22 million Americans and keep disastrous Medicaid cuts as part of his billionaire-first budget than work with Democrats on a common-sense proposal that safeguards health care for working families.”

One reason for this focus is the knowledge that there is some congressional Republican support for extending the Obamacare subsidies to avoid big premium spikes as early as November for millions of largely middle-class beneficiaries. The clearest way to a deal to reopen the government would be a Trump-imposed compromise on the subsidies that Democrats could claim as a victory. A repeal of OBBBA-enacted Medicaid cuts, however, is not happening in a million years. But if (a) this is really all about the Obamacare subsidies, and (b) Republicans have their own incentives for a deal on them, and an emperor-king who might force them to swallow them, then why do Democrats need a government shutdown to make that happen? Why not just keep the government open and negotiate with Trump on their one realizable goal, knowing that if a deal doesn’t happen the president and his party will totally get blamed for the premium spikes?

The reason is pretty simple: The shutdown is not simply about health care. It’s about a congressional minority seizing on the one bit of leverage they have to address the issue that has it in an absolute panic: the complicity of congressional Republicans in Trump’s authoritarian power grabs. The radical position of the Trump administration is that the president’s 2024 “mandate” should give him plenary authority over the executive branch of the federal government, including funding levels for federal programs and the number and deployment of all federal employees. The chaotic DOGE raids on the “deep state,” Russell Vought’s spending freezes and clawbacks, and Vought’s future threats to conduct mass layoffs of federal employees in case of a government shutdown are all part of the plan to give Trump quasi-dictatorial powers. His allies in Congress may privately grumble about being reduced to a choir singing his everlasting praises, but they aren’t doing anything about it.

Democrats can and should point out the material costs to Americans of the GOP’s reverse–Robin Hood economic agenda, which is a tale as old as time. But they shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking voters are too stupid or narrow-minded to understand the threat being posed to their own right of self-government by a trifecta regime bent on consolidating all power in a corrupt, hateful, and egomaniacal old man. One reason parties controlling the White House generally do poorly in midterm elections is that a significant segment of the electorate instinctively wants to place a curb on power-hungry presidents. If there was ever an opportunity to evoke this healthy impulse, Democrats have it right now, and they should be loud and proud about it.

Watching the evolution of the slowly approaching government shutdown crisis in Congress, it’s reasonably clear congressional Democrats are traumatized by what happened in March, and I wrote about how they’re dealing with that at New York:

Congressional Democrats are understandably unhappy with what happened last time they faced a government-shutdown crisis. In March, Republicans forced them into a trap where they either had to vote for another GOP-sponsored stopgap-spending measure, which offered Democrats zero concessions, or obstruct it and trigger a shutdown, punishing the government employees who were already being besieged by Elon Musk’s DOGE and other Trump administration attacks. In the House, where Democrats had no power at all, it was an easy choice: They all voted against the GOP measure. But in the Senate, where a filibuster could have very definitely stopped the bill, Democratic leader Chuck Schumer did a lot of saber-rattling but then caved, rounding up enough votes to end the filibuster and ensure the government stayed open.

Democratic activists were infuriated, and House Democrats suggested Senate Democrats were gutless. The whole episode accomplished nothing other than underlining Democratic Party fecklessness, the lack of unified party leadership, and the whip hand held by the bully Donald Trump and his subalterns in Congress.

Now they’re back to a near-identical point as the spending authority approved in March runs out on September 30. Republicans are again offering an extension of current spending levels — this one a short-term measure until November 20 — with zero concessions to the Democrats whose votes are necessary to keep the government open. To their credit, Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries are moving in lockstep this time around, agreeing to a common strategy and message. But even those gestures reflect an atmosphere of mistrust and an underlying fear of once again angering the Democratic “base.”

In recognition of their leverage, Democrats began talking weeks ago about conditions that needed to be met to earn their votes to head off a shutdown. Some wanted the Trump administration to rein in budget director Russell Vought’s highly provocative and probably unconstitutional spending clawbacks; why agree to spending levels if the people running the country felt free to ignore them? Others were interested in getting a grip on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ravaging of U.S. science, medicine, and public-health infrastructure. But the main focus among Democrats was the issue they’ve long considered their strongest heading toward the 2026 midterms: the damage being done to Americans’ access to health insurance. That meant demanding at a minimum the continuation of Obamacare premium subsidies due to expire at the end of the year, which were omitted from Trump’s megabill because of their cost and the hatred of many Republicans of the president’s signature policy accomplishment. This seemed potentially achievable because at least some Republicans feared blowback from a spike in premiums affecting many millions of middle-class Americans as early as November if the subsidies are allowed to die. And other Democrats wanted to demand the cancellation of some of the Medicaid cuts already enacted in the bill — a sure poison pill for the GOP.

The “counterproposal” unveiled by Schumer and Jeffries late Wednesday includes all the above and more, as the New York Times reports:

“Congressional Democrats on Wednesday proposed adding well over $1 trillion for Medicaid and other health programs to a stopgap spending plan needed to fund the government past Sept. 30, laying out steep demands in a showdown with Republicans that is threatening a shutdown within weeks.

“Democrats put forward a bill that would fund the government through Oct. 31 and permanently extend Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. It would reverse cuts to Medicaid and other health programs enacted this year as part of Republicans’ marquee tax and spending cut legislation.

“The measure would also restrict the Trump administration’s ability to unilaterally claw back funding Congress previously approved, a power that President Trump has repeatedly invoked.”

In addition, the proposal would restore public broadcasting funds and vastly increase the amount of money Republicans have endorsed for boosting security for government officials in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. Overall, the idea appears to be to maximize and publicize the distance between the two parties on ground Democrats think they can defend.

To put it mildly, Republicans are certain to give this “plan” a frosty reception, and that seems to be fine with Democrats. As Punchbowl News reports, the GOP has formed an iron consensus in support of a “clean” stopgap bill (or to use the technical jargon, “continuing resolution” or CR) until November, delaying any concessions at all, and at the same time keeping their own fractious members from issuing their own demands for keeping the government open (mostly involving deeper spending cuts):

“[N]early every provision in this package is a non-starter for Republicans. …

“To be clear, Republicans simply have no interest in negotiating. They feel like Democrats felt in the past: Negotiating under these circumstances is validating the Democrats’ position. Republicans are comfortable saying that they’ve proposed a clean CR, which is what Democrats usually ask for, to buy time for bipartisan full-year FY2026 funding talks.”

So Democrats are complaining that Republicans won’t negotiate with them over their demands, while Republicans are complaining that Democrats won’t keep the government open and negotiate over policies later. They are talking past each other in a way that seems to make at least some sort of shutdown very likely.

But from the Democratic perspective, the big fear is another display of weakness and disunity. Right on the brink of the confrontation in Congress, there were clear signs of what “the base” wants to happen, as Semafor reports:

“A new survey from the progressive firm Data for Progress and research firm Grow Progress, shared first with Semafor, shows seven in 10 Democrats support their party withholding votes unless Republicans make changes even if it risks a shutdown, while a similar share backs their party taking a ‘firmer stand’ than they did in March.

“What’s more, Democrats are arguing voters will blame the Republicans who control government for a shutdown, and the poll shows their voters share that view, 82-14. Large majorities of Democrats also think the party should fight President Donald Trump harder — even if they don’t win.”

So after emphatically rejecting the “clean CR,” Jeffries and Schumer appear to be steeling themselves for an inevitable shutdown and taking the opportunity to do some partisan “messaging” on health care and other Democratic priorities. Its primary purpose is to ensure nobody breaks rank and repeats what happened in March. In effect, Democrats are tying their own hands so that none of them can wave a white flag. This will be a fine tonic for the troops around the country, but it’s unclear where that leaves the federal government. We’re now at the point in every game of “chicken” where someone will have to blink.

Some news from the strange world of Donald Trump took me way down memory lane to the 1970s, as I explained at New York:

There had been vague talk for a while in both major-party circles about holding a pre-midterms national convention (or as it was once known, a “mini-convention”). For Democrats to do something like this would be like turning around a battleship. For Republicans, all it took was one Truth Social post:

“The Republicans are going to do a Midterm Convention in order to show the great things we have done since the Presidential Election of 2024. Time and place to be determined. Stay tuned, it will be quite the Event, and very exciting! President DJT.”

President Trump could change his mind, of course, but it makes some sense from his point of view. He knows preserving Republicans’ governing trifecta is going to be an uphill climb in 2026, given the historical pattern of the White House party almost always losing House seats in the midterms. His iron control of the GOP means it won’t be hard to impose discipline on hand-picked delegates to an event like this, essentially making it a big paid ad for the party and its messages. And let’s face it, this could be the last Trump event, perhaps in conjunction with the Semiquincentennial (250th) celebration of the nation’s founding in July, at which he won’t have to share the spotlight with anyone (presumably the 2028 RNC will have to give a fair amount of stage time to his successor).

On the other hand, the historical precedent for this sort of spectacle isn’t great. Democrats held mini-conventions in 1974 and 1978, and as far as I can remember, nobody much regretted the subsequent decision to stop having them.

The 1974 confab in Kansas City actually took place in December, after the midterm elections; it was basically held to adopt a party “charter” and overcome divisions that threatened to divide the party before the midterms. After more factional skirmishing, the delegates came together over a document consolidating party reforms, and the event was mainly known for introducing the so-called “Watergate class” of newly elected Democrats.

In 1978, Democrats held another post-midterms mini-convention, this one in Memphis. Its main purpose was to unify the party behind a beleaguered President Jimmy Carter. But it was widely shunned by Democratic elected officials, and its overall lack of success was reflected in 1980 when Carter had to overcome a tough renomination challenge from Ted Kennedy, before losing a landslide general election to Ronald Reagan.

We’ll see if Democrats feel compelled to follow suit with their own midterm gathering, presumably before the elections this time, despite their own unhappy precedents. They’d be well advised to think this through carefully before moving ahead. Unlike Republicans, they have no dictatorial leader to make them sing together harmoniously, and a midterm convention could easily become the venue for factional and generational bloodletting, along with a very crowded stage for a potentially vast number of 2028 proto-presidential candidates jostling for attention. Unless Democrats think voters will excitedly greet any sign of free speech and party vitality before they vote in 2026, they might want to spend their limited time on the campaign trail rather than staging an event. But there’s no guarantee the Republican clambake will be a success, either. Given how stale and artificial national political conventions have become, one every four years is probably enough.

In the wake of the assassination of conservative superstar activist Charlie Kirk, Democrats have largely been bystanders as the president decides how to exploit the tragedy for his own advantage. But there is one prominent Republican voice that should be heard, as I explained at New York:

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination in Utah earlier this week, before there was any real information on the identity or motives of the assassin, President Donald Trump addressed the nation with an angry screed blaming the “radical left” (his term for Democrats) for the crime and vowing official vengeance against those who had allegedly inspired the killing by uttering high-volume insults at Kirk and other MAGA folk.

From that point, we all held our breaths in anticipation of the terrible moment when the assassin would be connected tangibly to one of America’s political or culture-war “tribes” and efforts like Trump’s to assign collective responsibility gained real steam.

This morning, after a rather clumsy leak by the president on Fox & Friends, a press conference featuring federal, state, and local law-enforcement figures and presided over by Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, officially unveiled the name of the suspect, 22-year-old Utah student Tyler Robinson, along with some preliminary data from discovered evidence suggesting “anti-fascism” might be his motive. You could hear the engines of partisan and ideological vengeance getting ready to rev up across the internet.

But then Cox seized the spotlight with an extended and heartfelt call for a de-escalation of efforts to assign collective responsibility for the assassination. He even quoted Charlie Kirk himself on the essential nature of “forgiveness” and implicitly repudiated Trump’s claim that the “radical left” had incited the killer with anti-MAGA rhetoric:

“We need moral clarity right now. I hear all the time that words are violence. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. There is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody.”

He went on to cite the pacific reaction from his own state to a crime many of them deplored for ideological, moral, and religious reasons,

As it happens, Cox, who is getting more national exposure than ever before, has made this sort of call for civility a hallmark of his political career. He apologized to a Utah LGBTQ+ group for his own past homophobia after the Pulse-nightclub murders in Florida in 2016. As National Governors Association chairman in 2023–24, he spearheaded a “Disagree Better” initiative to foster less-polarized bipartisan conversation. And when he broke from his own history of disdain for Donald Trump (not unusual among Utah Republicans) to endorse him in 2024, it was because he naïvely imagined that Trump’s own near brush with death might make him more amenable to a “national unity” message.

Now that there is at least a shred of evidence linking the prime suspect to “the left” (though a lot more suggesting he’s a mentally ill young man living in an essentially apolitical gamer fantasy universe), we get to find out if Cox’s pleas that Kirk’s assassination not be politicized strike a chord among his fellow partisans, beginning with Trump himself.

The next move is Trump’s. But he must implicitly or explicitly respond to Cox and his call for peace — the kind of peace we used to expect presidents to supply whenever the country was in turmoil.

I know there’s a lot going on this week that’s more important than still more look-backs at 2024, but one development does require a look within the Democratic camp, and I wrote it up at New York:

The period of finger-pointing and blame-shifting among Democrats for their 2024 election defeat should be near its end, but not before hearing from Kamala Harris. Her book on the 2024 campaign, 107 Days, will be released by Simon & Schuster on September 23, but The Atlantic has published an excerpt about her life as vice-president prior to Joe Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out. The only way to put it is that Harris is seething with anger over her treatment by Team Biden before she was suddenly thrust into the global limelight as the putative replacement candidate.

The excerpt begins on the very day of Biden’s withdrawal, when in her eyes the president subtly disrespected her one more time in his speech to the nation:

“I watched it at the hotel that night. It was a good speech, drawing on the history of the presidency to locate his own place within it. But as my staff later pointed out, it was almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address before he mentioned me.

“’I want to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris. She is experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and leader for our country.’

“And that was it.”

The rest of the excerpt is an indictment of the preparation she was given for the herculean task she inherited when Biden stepped away. The White House staff undermined her from day one, says the former veep:

“When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire,’ the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans …

“They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.”

Indeed, says Harris, Team Biden was encouraging nasty stories about her:

“I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a ‘chaotic’ office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.

Instead of defending her from “unfair or inaccurate” stories, Biden’s “inner circle” came up with an infernal first major policy assignment so that she could be “knocked down a little bit more”: immigration.

Harris dutifully went on a whirlwind trip to the Latin American countries from which migrants were heading to our southern border, a chore that led to the ludicrous but very damaging conservative label of “border czar” that Republicans hit her with right down to Election Day.

“[N]o one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved….

“Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.”

She finally got the task at which she would subsequently shine when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. But according to Harris, she was not assigned the role of chief defender of reproductive rights. She seized the opportunity created by Biden’s inhibitions about discussing abortion publicly:

“Here was a huge issue on which the president was not seeking to lead. Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment. He ceded that leadership to me.”

So when Democrats made a stronger-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections, she should have gotten some real credit, certainly within the White House:

“Joe was already polling badly on the age issue, with roughly 75 percent of voters saying he was too old to be an effective president. Then he started taking on water for his perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza.

“When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging …

“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital….

“His team didn’t get it.”

That’s where the excerpt ends, with a blunt accusation of Biden White House cluelessness, compounding the “recklessness” that Biden himself showed in delaying his withdrawal from the campaign so late in the day:

“’It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

To be very clear, we don’t know yet whether the bulk of the book devoted to her campaign continues this narrative of Team Biden sabotage, or simply treats it as a handicap as she began the uphill climb toward November. In a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, she disclaimed any intention of “piling on” to criticism of the 46th president. But even if you take her word as gospel about her treatment by the president’s “inner circle,” it doesn’t offer much of a rationale for why she lost to Donald Trump.

Yes, some of the attack lines his campaign pursued against her with Elon Musk’s money reflected narratives begun or strengthened during her vice-presidential tenure. But others very clearly went back to positions she took and things she said during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, which for the most part she never bothered to contradict or contextualize. Biden and his staff had nothing to do with the disastrous 2019 interview she did in which she appeared to enthusiastically endorse free gender-transition surgery for imprisoned criminals who were also illegal immigrants, a huge combo platter of MAGA bait that led to an incredible number of attack ads in 2024 and helped obliterate her own message.

More generally, it was the overall Biden administration record on inflation and immigration that sank the Harris-Walz ticket, according to most informed analysis, not insufficient veep prestige within that administration. If she was treated as poorly as she now claims, perhaps she should have talked about it publicly as a way to distance herself from an unpopular president.

Now it all sounds like sour grapes. But she has every right to tell her side of the sad story.