The Vibe Shifts Back

The Vibe Shifts Back
This week marks a pivot on many fronts—the election results, the new consensus that the government shutdown is hurting Republicans and helping Democrats, the administration’s doubling-down response to that emergent consensus, the possible collapse of the GOP’s Congressional redistricting ploy, the Supreme Court’s apparent skepticism regarding Trump’s tariff regime, and a long series of losses for the administration in the courts, with pushback against the administration’s anti-democratic actions via executive orders and setbacks in their vindictive prosecutions of individuals.
At this moment, there’s a fracture between the Administration and the Senate GOP regarding how to end the shutdown, which reveals two opposing theories within the GOP about how the shutdown impasse can play out. Trump is demanding that the Senate revoke its filibuster rule, allowing budget bills and other major legislation to pass by simple majority. The filibuster is a legislative tactic that relies on the Senate’s cloture rule for cutting off debate on any given issue; it’s not a statute of any kind. Interestingly, there is also a long-standing enthusiasm for ending the filibuster among many left-of-center Democrats, born of frustration with progressive agenda items being massively watered down as a matter of course, in order to secure the necessary votes for passage. In the view of the GOP Senators who are opposing decisively renouncing the filibuster, and who seem to be willing to fall on their swords on this issue, in spite of Trump’s apparent readiness to call them out personally, killing the filibuster will cause chaos if and when the opposing party regains control of the Senate, while it increases the likelihood that voters will punish the Republicans in 2026 and 2028 and bring that chaos on. In this telling, the Senate would thereby lose its identity as the legislative house that preserves continuity of law, while the House of Representatives is more responsive to the popular will. Trump’s implicit counter to this argument is either “apres moi, le deluge”--who cares what happens after I’m gone--, or more ominously, that the Senators needn’t worry because the Democrats will never again have an opportunity to take back control.
The alternative to ending the filibuster would be to do the normal thing, and re-open talks with the Democrats regarding their stated reason for refusing to fund the federal government on the terms that the GOP laid out earlier this year, when they passed the One Big Beautiful Bill without any Democratic participation. In this fight, Democrats narrowed their demands to one—restore the subsidies for Medicaid and Affordable Care Act-based medical insurance that were passed inn 2021. This was a very targeted ask. The Republicans wanted to render the ACA inoperable, but they didn’t want to take the blame for it. The GOP playbook here was to ensure that Democratic constituents suffer from furloughs, job losses, benefit denials, and so on, ratcheting up the pain until the Democrats concede, showing that they are powerless to protect anyone who puts their trust in the opposition party. That tactic is failing, has in fact already failed. The Trump Administration’s malign actions, from disruptive immigration raids to sending federal troops into urban streets, cutting off SNAP payments and cancelling airline flights, as well as their intransigence regarding the ACA subsidies and Medicaid, have broken through the partisan noise, and it’s now clear to voters who has ramped up the chaos, and why.
Connecting the dots, it’s also clear that ever since Trump first ordered federal troops to major US cities, Trump’s power grab has been an ongoing, dynamic and relentless process, a campaign to remove by degrees all checks on his personal power, whether they are based on the separation of powers among different branches of government and different jurisdictions, on internal controls within executive branch departments, or on the ability of citizens to vote his regime out of office. It was inevitable that at some point we’d see a move that clearly shows us what Trump is driving at. And it is pushback from conservative senators, including Majority Leader John Thune, Tom Tillis, good old Mitch McConnell, Mike Crapo, and James Lankford that is stopping Trump’s advance here.
These Senators are good enough politicians that they can recognize a major shift in public opinion when it shows up. Trump and the enablers in his cabinet may think that provoking chaos in the streets and then declaring a national emergency will allow them to take the complete control of government that they believe they deserve. They could still try that, but the likelihood that they’ll succeed has just decreased decisively. This is our naked lunch, as William Burroughs had it,” a frozen moment where everyone sees what’s on the end of every fork.”