Democrats Want Trump Himself to Negotiate Shutdown Deal
With the failure in the Senate of both a Republican-sponsored stopgap spending bill and a Democratic-sponsored “counterproposal,” we’re now just nine days away from a government shutdown with no clear prospects for resolving the deadlock. Democrats have put several poison pills on their list of demands for supplying the votes to avoid a shutdown (notably, the cancellation of some of the Medicaid cuts recently enacted in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and an end to spending clawbacks by OMB director Russell Vought). But their principal public complaint is that Republicans won’t even come to the bargaining table.
The Democrats’ latest maneuver has been to demand Donald Trump directly negotiate with them since his congressional vassals won’t go to the bathroom without a permission slip from the White House. CNBC reports:
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday urged President Donald Trump to meet with Democrats to strike a deal to avoid a government shutdown as the funding deadline looms.
“I hope and pray that Trump will sit down with us and negotiate a bipartisan bill,” Schumer said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” days before federal funding is set to expire on Sept. 30 …
Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also of New York, on Saturday sent a letter to Trump urging him to meet with Democrats “to reach an agreement to keep the government open.”
Oddly enough, Trump opened the door to a meeting while seeming to dismiss the idea of making any concessions to Democrats, as Bloomberg explains:
On Saturday, [Trump] suggested he sees little room for Democrats to make demands after their 2024 election defeat. “They want all this stuff, they haven’t changed, they haven’t learned from the biggest beating they’ve ever taken, just about,” he said. “I’d love to meet with them if they want to meet.”
The general feeling among Beltway observers is that, despite their many demands, the concession that Democrats actually need in order to declare victory and keep the government open is an extension of the Obamacare premium subsidies due to expire at the end of the year. There’s significant Republican interest in addressing that issue out of fear the GOP will be blamed for a huge spike in health-insurance premiums for millions of middle-class people. But Republican congressional leaders fear that any talk of a deal on subsidies will trigger a revolt among House Freedom Caucus types for whom anything related to Obamacare is an abomination. It’s possible Democrats think Trump could be more flexible on this subject and would simply order all Republicans to fall into line, Punchbowl News suggests:
[T]he Democrats’ chief ask — an extension of enhanced premium subsidies for Obamacare — is something many Hill Republicans want as well. So there’s a risk for [Mike] Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune in having Trump at the negotiating table with Schumer and Jeffries.
The timing may not be perfect for the dealmaking version of Trump to make an appearance to keep the “deep state” operating. His latest enthusiasm appears to be an acceleration of his plans to wreak vengeance on his many political enemies, feeding on the fury of MAGA folk who blame “the left” writ large for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Yet the president is also very focused on maintaining his grip on the country in the 2026 midterms via an against-the-odds drive to save his party’s narrow House majority by hook or by crook. If he’s convinced avoiding a health-insurance-premium spike is essential to achieving that goal, Trump may very well just tell Johnson and Thune to make it happen.
It’s a long shot, to be sure, but even if negotiations with Trump never happen, or go nowhere, it makes sense for Democrats to underline the complete subservience of their Republican colleagues to the relatively unpopular president on whose record the midterms will be a referendum. If Trump won’t negotiate, neither will Mike Johnson and John Thune, and the two parties can proceed to the messaging battle over blame for a shutdown they’re already rehearsing.