Democrats should be aggressive in Trump's government shutdown

In the high-stakes poker game of a government shutdown, where federal workers’ paychecks are the chips and the nation’s stability is the pot, a New Jersey Democrat is proposing that her party stop folding its hand and finally start raising the stakes.

Lisa McCormick, an activist who is known for her stunning performance in the 2018 Democratic primary, has outlined a strategy of escalating demands, a folk song of a political plan where each new verse adds another layer of pressure on a Republican opposition she accuses of bargaining in bad faith.

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that shutdowns are a losing game for the party that triggers them. But McCormick argues that when the other side has taken a wrecking ball to the very idea of functional government, playing it safe is the surest way to lose.

Her approach begins with a simple, popular plea: make permanent the Affordable Care Act subsidies that lower health care costs for 15 million families. Without them, premiums are set to skyrocket.

Yet, that is merely the opening line of the song. From there, the refrain builds. The next day, Democrats should demand that all furloughed federal employees be rehired with back pay.

The day after, they must dig in against a pointless and provocative proposal to rename the Department of Defense back to the Department of War.

By the end of the week, the list crescendos to include a public reckoning, demanding that President Donald Trump apologize for what she calls his documented lies about who is responsible for shuttering the government’s doors.

The brilliance of the strategy, in its own peculiar way, is that there is no end to the list of reasonable demands that can be added.

For every day that Republicans refuse to negotiate in good faith, the price of their obstinacy increases.

It is a recognition that the mission of government—to promote the general welfare, ensure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty—is being systematically undermined by officials who see departments not as instruments of public good, but as tools for partisan retaliation, ecological destruction, and financial mismanagement.

And the political winds may be blowing in favor of such fortitude. Contrary to the nervous hand-wringing in some corridors of power, polls from Navigator Research and Morning Consult show a plurality of Americans, and particularly independents, are prepared to blame Trump and Republicans for this mess.

The felon president, for all his sound and fury, is historically unpopular at this stage of his term, a messenger whose power of persuasion fractures the moment it reaches beyond his core base.

There is a certain, stubborn American logic to it all. When a man refuses to come to the table, you do not bring him a smaller meal; you instead set a grander feast, one whose aroma he cannot ignore, and you invite every hungry soul in the nation to see who it is that would deny them a seat.

The entire proposition is punctuated with a simple, unyielding hashtag: #NoRetreat.

A government shutdown is a serious affair, a disruption that ripples through the lives of thousands. But it is also a political exercise, one of the few points of leverage available to a party standing against what it sees as a force of chaos.

McCormick’s plan suggests that sometimes, the only way to win a fight against someone who has brought a wrecking ball is not to offer a smaller target, but to present them with a structure too valuable, and an audience too large, for them to dare take another swing.