MORNING GLORY: The Beltway bubble leads Democrats off a political cliff
If you want to know the headlines that the few thousand people who run Washington read in the morning, check the three big platforms that used to be big newspapers — the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post — the two big news networks that dominate online traffic — FoxNews.com and CNN.com — and the four "newsletters" that are avidly read within the Beltway even though they barely make a ripple outside of it: Axios, Semafor, Politico and Punchbowl News.
That’s nine total landing pages. Check them all tomorrow and every day thereafter that the "Schumer Shutdown," named justly for Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), goes on. Those nine pages will slowly, but surely, chart the rising cost to Democrats of the shuttering of the government. Schumer lost three votes from his caucus on Tuesday night and the pressure is only going to grow with every day that goes by.
The nine landing pages all joined on Wednesday in either the "both sides are responsible" if they are liberal outlets, or the other approach favored by the neutrals: "Federal Government shuts down!"
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If you are a senator or representative from a blue state or district, you could perhaps be excused for thinking that the country isn’t going to blame you. Maybe. But that’s going to change very quickly.
Those electeds might even have thought on Tuesday night that somehow President Donald Trump, or Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), or House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) would get "blamed," and that the stunt engineered to placate the dominant, but whacky, left-wing of the Democrats could actually work.
They were wrong Tuesday night and they are wrong this morning and every morning to come.
Because everybody knows.
Those nine pages are going to change and the branding of the "Schumer Shutdown" is going to spread. Inexorably. Because it is true. And because everybody already knows it is true. Every Democrat knows it is true.
That’s the harsh reality for Democrats: Everybody. Knows.
They know that Schumer is afraid of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and the hard left Democrats she leads. It’s "unofficial leadership," of course, but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) passed the baton to AOC and she is using it to beat Democrats into line. Schumer knows he will lose to her in a primary in 2028 because he’s 74 now, has been in Congress for 50 years and will be 78 when he runs again.
I don’t know, because I can’t read minds, but I suspect that Schumer cannot imagine life after being in Congress. It is reasonable to guess that he’s actually afraid of not being in Congress.
How could anyone after 50 years in the same halls, doing basically the same thing, not be afraid of that sudden evisceration of purpose? Schumer is a Hill creature. He won’t know what to do with himself when he’s retired via a primary challenge which is most assuredly coming. (Schumer could take the dignified way out as Congressman Jerry Nadler did by announcing his retirement, but Nadler had never mattered and Schumer has occasionally mattered. It’s harder to leave a job that matters than one that doesn’t.)
Schumer organized enough Democrats to vote for a Continuing Resolution in the spring to avoid a government shutdown and got creamed by his left wing for doing so. Now Schumer has refused to do it again because he can’t handle a second battering from the left.
Part of the left is ignorant of the rules of the Senate, but part of it is bent on this fight it cannot win because they have lost, lost, lost for ten years. Even when they won with former President Joe Biden, they lost because of his infirmity and the stubbornness of his family and inner circle. Thus, they are in the wilderness and they are angry about it.
Thus, the shutdown. And I suspect it is going to go on until Schumer receives assurances from his caucus and perhaps even from AOC that he won’t get put in the barrel again.
That might be a while because Democrats are not just angry, they are blind — or to put it more precisely, they are blinded by the legacy media and the newsletters they consume. They may very well think they are "winning." Look at the nine. Or watch some MSNBC, or whatever it is called now.
The left-wing legacy platforms do not matter to the majority of the country and that’s the key. The country beyond the Beltway understands that Democrats shuttered the federal government, not Trump, or Thune, or Johnson. Voters are always much smarter than Beltway elites credit them with being. Voters don’t get their news from the legacy media or newsletters by and for Beltway elites. They get their news from the platform you are reading right now and from each other.
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"News" is now mediated by a thousand sources, from "The Ruthless Podcast" (now part of the vast Fox News family, as is this column), to The Free Press (soon to be owned by CBS if reports are correct) and hundreds of talk show hosts on radio or with podcasts, the consumers of which talk to each other. The legacy media doesn't actually matter much anymore when it comes to "making the news." It takes the truth to form a national consensus and the truth will come out.
Eventually, every citizen "sees" the tapestry that are all the news sources at a distance sufficient to allow patterns to emerge. And this particular pattern has "Democrats shut down the government for no reason at all" written all over it.
Democrats went full "Thelma and Louise" over the shutdown cliff because they don’t listen to anyone except themselves.
It’s going to be a hard landing. The sooner the Democrats pull the parachute, the better it will be for them. But there’s lag time in polling. It could be a while. A very long while as the GOP has absolutely no reason to move an inch. None. And they won’t.
Hugh Hewitt is host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.