Bulwark Takes - Democratic Leaders STILL Don’t Understand Raw Power

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

JVL and Andrew Egger argue that Democrats are bungling the shutdown fight by focusing on healthcare policy instead of wielding raw political power. From Russ Vought’s chaos plan to Biden’s failed “normal politics” strategy, they explain why the stakes are higher than Democrats seem to realize. Tickets to Bulwark Live in DC (10/8) with Sarah, Tim and JVL are on sale now at https://TheBulwark.com/events.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, guys, it's JVL, here with my colleague at the bulwark, Andrew Eger, and we're here, because I'm going to try to make the case that the Democrats are a bunch of forking idiots in what they are asking for in this shutdown fight with Donald Trump. And, Andrew, I'm going to first, I'm going to let you explain to the people.

What is the Democratic ask for the minority party, which does not control either House of Congress? Yeah. So they shouldn't need to have an ask period. There are a couple things here, right? And they both have to do with health care. The Democrats want to, one, roll back some of the cuts to Medicaid that were just made a couple of months ago in the one big beautiful bill act that was past this summer, basically before they go into effect at all. Like just, hey, let's not cut quite as much money for Medicaid as you guys wanted to before. Cool. Can we do that maybe? The other thing is there are some Obamacare subsidies. The federal government was kind of pouring more money. into those Obamacare exchanges that are a few years old. They were launched under COVID, in theory, kind of as a temporary measure at the time,

but which if they expire now, will cause a pretty significant jump in a lot of people's, millions and millions of people's health care premiums in just a couple of months here. And so, and so, you know, Democrats have wanted to get those renewed for a while. They, they, you know, fought over it in a couple different pieces of legislation. And at this point, they're finally like, okay, these guys aren't negotiating with us at all. So we're going to draw a line in the sand here. We are going to refuse to give you the seven Senate votes you need to get over a filibuster unless you are going to make some concessions on these particular health care spending issues.

All right. So this is why these idiots are always losing. The Democrats are saying, we will help you pass the bill. You can't pass even though you own the majority. and our ask is that you do this thing that will make people's lives slightly better that you will then get credit for. This is the dumbest fucking politics

that has ever been politiced in the history of the world. The idea that they're going to save the Trump administration, the price of their acquiescence is to save the Trump administration from itself and to prevent Trump voters, especially in rural areas with Medicaid cuts and all that that will do to rural health access is to prevent those people from having touched the stove. Are you fucking kidding?

Why not say the price of our signing on is that we want you to bail out the soybean farmers? Why not just do that while you're at it? This is, there is a, and again, I simply don't understand except to say that Democrats in Congress, not all of them. I'm sure they're a couple, but they simply don't understand what time it is. There is only one ask for them that is worth them helping at all, and that is things that affect baseline power structures. D.C. statehood. They have a perfectly good pretext. They can say, we have been very alarmed by the intrusion of federal troops into Washington, D.C. This was only able to happen because D.C. wasn't a state. It is very important to us to protect the integrity

and sovereignty of all of the places in America. And so we want D.C. statehood. Make Washington D.C. a state. Give it to Senate seats, motherfuckers. Yeah, then we'll help you pass your bill. Other than that, sit and spin. Like, I just don't understand why they would have, as their compromise ask, something that helps Trump and doesn't help them fix the fundamental problems in the power structure. Yeah, and you wouldn't even have to go that far.

I mean, like, there's, that would be one, one very much, like, kind of swing for the fences way of doing it, right? But there are other power-focused procedural asks that they could do here. One that I was thinking of is they could get some laws on the books to rein in the president's emergency powers, right? I mean, Donald Trump has spent his whole first term governing, you know, anytime he couldn't get the Senate to do what he wanted to do, there were a couple really high profile times when he would just declare national emergencies for tariffs or to get to build the wall on the southern border or things like that. A lot of people were like, huh, that's a really interesting loophole that that is, I guess, fine under current law because people just didn't really think presidents would try to run entire policy agendas through these sort of emergency channels. we should do something about that, but they never did.

Even during Biden, they never did. You could grab a policy that Utah Senator Mike Lee first introduced during the first Trump administration, the Article I act that says the president can declare national emergencies, but they expire after 30 days unless Congress approves them. You know, like little procedural good government things that would actively constrain the way that Donald Trump is running a government. That would be a policy ask. They could absolutely say, we're not going to fund the government anymore.

You could, you could forbid President Trump from continuing to claw back Congressional appropriated spending through these likely illegal rescission packages. I mean, like, these are, these are things that like, if you're the Democrats, it's, is it breaking, like, is it, like, is it like breaking some kind of norm or something like that to have these, to, like, have these asks that are specifically about constraining Donald Trump from doing all of these things and then being able to go to the American people and say, look, like, yeah, it's a big deal to shut down the government, but like, look what's going on out there? Like, look at all this stuff that's been happening.

For federal law enforcement officers and requiring them to not wear masks and to always wear identification. I mean, these are, again, these are just obvious things. And yet the Democratic response is, well, we really want to really care about health care access and we want to do good policy work. Let me. You know, if it, this is what fucking, this is what nobody's a bigger defender of Joe Biden than me, sort of. But the Joe Biden theory. But the Joe Biden theory the case was. Yes, we had an authoritarian attempt in America. Yes, we had an attempted coup, but I'm not going to pour gasoline on this. I'm not going to make anybody a martyr. We're going to fake it till we make it. We are going to go back and act as though things are normal

and we live in a normal time where people care about policy outcomes that affect their lives. We're to do bipartisan shit with Republicans. And we're just going to pass a bunch of stuff, let the fever dissipate, let the poison drain out of the system, and that's how we're going to return America to normal. You know what? That was not a crazy theory in 2021, but it was wrong, right? I mean, it was just wrong, and it doesn't matter that there's no way that Biden could have known that it was wrong or not.

Like, sometimes it doesn't matter if you can't know the right answer. But we do now, and that Democrats continue acting this way as if this doesn't require, like, extraordinary things that are focused on power because the time is late and it's not regular order. Yeah. Let me, let me try to steal in this a little bit because I think that there is one really good counter argument to what you just laid out about Joe Biden's theory of the case there, which is that, yeah, that was the theory that that was the playbook Joe Biden tried to run, but it didn't work. Like, he did not actually succeed in like bringing about all of these really good policy outcomes. He had some really good policy outcomes. You know,

If you weigh them all up on both sides of the scale, I think we would agree that, like, the economic policy outcomes were quite good. He managed the post-pandemic as well as anybody could have. But there were all of these humongous negative externalities coming out of Joe Biden, inflation being the most obvious, him being a fossil, being the second most obvious, right? I mean, these were things that, like, really-

And everything, right? You could say that about every single presidential. But I'm just saying it doesn't disprove the case of, like, if you give people better policy outcomes, they will they will you know support you more because in the reality is that like inflation kills everybody when it like if if you are president and there's runaway inflation under you you're going to lose like that's just like that that was the case around the world the last couple of years it's been the case throughout american history i mean like that just kind of happened so i i

do not fully agree with you that like the the american people got what they what they should have been grateful for on policy outcomes during Biden and therefore that theory of the case was wrong but at the same time. So again, like, let me, let me just steal, man, what, what, uh, Democrats are doing right now along those lines. Here's the way they think about this. They think that Donald Trump's biggest, like, electoral vulnerability going into next year's midterms is going to be health care. It's going to be, you know, kitchen, like, again, the spending. And so we're going to try to make him fix that so that he doesn't hurt people as much. Well, let me, let, I, I think you can make the argument that, like, if they succeeded, it would be stupid. Like, you would be, you would be

sort of protecting these people. But I think they don't expect to succeed. I think. I that they are trying to raise a big stink, shut things down, make this be like the main story, and then lose and then basically say, okay, you guys have to pass this thing. And like, just so you all remember, like, these are the Republican laws that they pass that are going to make everything a lot more expensive for you, like immediately. And they are hoping that that will then translate into votes next year, right? But at the same time, it is this humongous bank shot. No, this, I'm totally serious about this. Just don't fund it. So you guys, you guys, you guys go nuke the filibuster

you want us to come to you fuck you you come to us right it just doesn't they hold all the cards here it said that they are too limp-a-to-do to do anything you're going to have to bleep that sorry to do anything about it

and I simply I just don't understand how any of these idiots have been in politics and yet have such a thin understanding of power and what power is and how it works. And you know, one of the tells here, Trump and all of his people are doing like real heavy working.

Like, oh, don't throw us into the briar. We really like this. We love this so much. You won't believe how much we love this shutdown. Ah, we're winning. You don't do that if you actually love the shutdown and you think you're going to win it. And I, man.

It'd be nice to have a Democratic Party that understood how to do politics and play hardball and understood the stakes and knew what time it was and didn't think that Donald Trump was just a normal continuation of everything else. And nice to have a Democratic Party that believed the things that we say here about what the state of democracy is. It has been very strange watching, you know, the dynamic of like Chuck Schumer and John Thune in the Senate, right? Democratic minority leader,

Rojolk and Majority Leader. They had like a weird little kind of like cordial like, maybe we have a maybe we agree on more than we thought we did about shutdown politics moment on the Senate floor yesterday, which is like that's kind of Thune's move, right? I mean, he's a lot more mild-mannered. He's a lot more kind of like he's like a, he predates Donald Trump.

He kind of came into office during the Tea Party. He's been in Senate leadership for a long time. He's sort of genteel, right? He kind of, he's soft-spoken, whatever. He can do that kind of thing with Chuck Schumer. Another thing John Thune can do is talk about the stuff that Russ Vote is doing with this shutdown, where he is, you know, yanking wires out of the walls of the government and threatening to fire all these people and, you know, canceling projects left and right in blue states, nakedly just saying, we're only going after the ones in blue states. John Thune can look at Russ Vote doing that and be like, man, I guess it was just a real strategic mistake for Chuck Schumer to let the government shut down and give Russ Vote all this power. I don't really know what he expected to see happen, right?

I mean, it's like, it's, nobody's working in good faith on this. And you are absolutely right that like, it's, it's, it's like they finally focus tested enough that they were like, oh gosh, our base really wants us to shut this thing down. Let's figure out how we're going to do that. And I guess this is the one here, go, we'll do this. And it's like, no, like they are, they are very clearly even still, even though they are now in theory fighting on this in a kind of more radical way than before they. Stupid as possible way.

Yeah. The stupidest possible way. And you know what? Honestly, God help me. Gavin Newsom wouldn't do this. Say what you will about Gavin Newsom. If he was in charge, he would be a hard ass here.

And he would know what the stakes were and how to play. I can't believe that this is where we are. We're living in a world where I'm pining for Gavin Newsom. Yeah, this is one of those. Like, as long as we're fantasizing, let's just fantasize the world with fewer, sociopaths in there and not more, you know, but, but I mean, I can't, I can't argue with the, with the basic analytical point. Guys, we'll be back soon within the hour, probably with more

bad news. It's all we ever do around here. Hit like, hit subscribe, follow the channel, ride with the bulwark. Good luck, America.