What Does it Mean to Make a Deal?

Johnson has the House out of session for another week to avoid swearing in Adelita Grijalva, but the longer the House is out of session, the more we have to wonder about the point of a deal. Russell Vought is supposedly firing/furloughing/whatever a bunch of federal employees. An arbitrary set of government functions are still operating, including the construction of Trump’s gilded ballroom. And Trump is going to raise tariffs on China to eleventy billion percent. In other words, unlike government shutdowns in normal times, the shutdown isn’t the only game in town, and the Trumpers are undermining their credibility as good faith negotiators by threatening, or doing, obviously illegal things like firing employees and saying they’re not gong to pay employees when the government re-opens.

If an administration continues to do whatever it feels like doing, as is has from the beginning by starving thousands of children waiting for US aid that’s rotting in warehouses, it raises the question of the point of making any kind of deal with them. If Trump’s brain worms tell him to withhold ACA subsidies, then ACA subsidies will be withheld, no matter what was agreed to in the deal to re-open the government.

I’m not trying to be a fatalist here, but let’s be real: the Democrats are doing what they should have done all along — stopping progress and saying “no”. It is true that saying “no” will pose a risk to their constituents, but it’s also certain that saying “yes” didn’t do a damn thing for them the last time Democrats had the opportunity to shut down the government.

The win here, if there is one, is to make Republicans look weak and disorganized, to raise awareness of the immense cost to voters of the huge ACA and Medicaid cuts, and if possible to get a deal that reverses those cuts. But I don’t see any benefit in blinking because it’s pretty clear that we’re winning. Republicans are lashing out and looking weak. Good.