Today, Explained - SHUTDATE UPDOWN

Episode Date: January 22, 2019

President Donald Trump would very much like a deal to end his shutdown. The Republican-controlled Senate is with him. Vox’s Dara Lind explains why the road ahead remains long. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the weekend, the president took a new approach to his shutdown. He offered Democrats a thing. The president said that he would agree to a three-year renewal of DACA protections for those young, undocumented immigrants known as DREAMers. The president also proposed extending temporary protected status for some 300,000 others. That is our plan. Border security, DACA, TPS, and many other things. Straightforward, fair, reasonable, and common sense. Last night, the text of that offer was released. But just like before, Democrats aren't biting. Man, Democrats were issuing statements saying they rejected the offer before Trump officially made it.

Dara Lind co-hosts the Weeds podcast from Vox. On Friday night and Saturday morning, there were beginning to be reports about the deal that Trump was going to make. And even before the actual speech at 4 p.m. on Saturday, Democrats were coming out saying, if this is it, we have no interest in dealing with this. This isn't sufficient. We're not biting. So why is Pelosi rejecting this stuff out of hand? There are three big reasons that kind of regardless of what came out of Donald Trump's mouth on Saturday, Democrats were not going to be interested. The first is that they have made it pretty clear that they are not interested in negotiating to reopen the government. They may negotiate once

the government reopens. The second is that they don't want to spend $5.7 billion for a wall. They've been very consistent that that's a deal breaker for them. And the third is they simply don't trust Donald Trump to stick to his guns. And, you know, when he says he's offering something, actually follow through with it. Right. This exact thing has already happened. Chuck Schumer, who's, you know, one of the two people who's very important to this negotiation on the Democratic side, had experience last year, like pretty much this time last year, where he thought he had a handshake deal with Trump to legalize Dreamers more broadly in exchange for much more money for the border wall. Schumer was willing to meet the president's full request for border wall funding, about $25 billion in exchange for legal protection for immigrants

brought to this country illegally as children. And then got a call back from John Kelly saying, nah, we're not doing that. You have to throw in all these other changes to legal immigration instead. So like, it's not clear how the Trump administration gets around that one at all, especially because over the weekend, you know, Democrats were already wary of whether Trump saying things meant that they were actually willing to make a deal. And then Trump got a bunch of blowback from the right and then issued a tweet on Sunday

denying the idea that extending legal status for DACA recipients was amnesty, but saying he might do an amnesty later, further infuriating the right. So Democrats are currently looking at this going, he's already under fire for man culture and company. Why should we believe that he's going to stand his ground on that one in order to give us anything that we want? And do we really want what he's offering? Especially since we have already said we don't want to come to the table until you've reopened the government and come off your $5.7 billion number. And this offer to extend DACA and TPS for three years, how big of a deal is it? It doesn't actually change the legal status of the immigrants who it's addressing. Right now, DACA recipients, despite the Trump administration's efforts to end the program, DACA recipients currently can apply for two-year renewals.

TPS holders continue to have legal status because the things that the Trump administration is doing to rescind legal status are held up in court. And so Democrats are kind of going, well, right now, DACA recipients are already protected for at least several more months because it really doesn't look like the Supreme Court is taking up that lawsuit this term, TPS recipients are protected for at least several more months. Just extending those protections for three years doesn't change the status quo rather than giving them actual full legal status, some kind of access to permanent residency or citizenship. And is that what the Democrats ultimately want, citizenship for DREAMers? I mean, they want something more than what currently exists. Like, currently TPS holders have legal status, but it doesn't allow them to apply for a green card. So, you know, creating some way that they could actually become full, you know, permanent residents and then citizens of the U.S. What the Trump administration is offering, in contrast, is extending what they already have because the Trump administration wanted to end those things. Extending DACA protections for three

years when you may very well have DACA protections extended for a year and a half anyway just because that's how long it's going to take the court case, doesn't seem as appealing to a lot of Democrats. Late this afternoon, the Senate reached a bipartisan agreement. For the first time, we will get a vote on whether to open up the government without any decision one way or the other on border security. To be clear, this agreement is simply for a vote coming Thursday, which would temporarily pause the shutdown to allow for negotiations. It will allow us to then debate without hostage taking, without temper tantrum, without anything, how we can best do border security, get that done hopefully by February 8th, and keep the government open. For now, the government remains partially shut down.

Despite the fact that we are going to have Senate votes to end the shutdown that we have not had, you know, since December, it's not really a sign that we're coming up in the home stretch of this just yet. Daryl Lynn writes about immigration for Vox. In a search for answers, for meaning, for clues as to how this whole mess might resolve itself, Dylan Matthews took a look at every prior government shutdown for Vox. Government shutdowns as we know them came out of two things. One was the Congressional Budget Act, which was passed in the wake of Watergate and meant to give Congress more control over the budget process. But they only started to happen because of a few legal memos that were written at the end of the Carter administration by Carter's attorney general, a guy named Benjamin Civilletti. What did he do? Civilletti wrote some legal opinions

about what the federal bureaucracy is supposed to do when there's a gap in funding. Okay. This had happened several times under Carter. And the way it worked back then is that if there was a funding gap, if an appropriations bill wasn't passed in time, the government just kept going. It sort of spent on credit even if Congress wasn't there to foot the bill. And what Civiletti concluded was that the Anti-Deficiency Act, which is an obscure bill from 1870 passed in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction banned the government from spending where Congress hadn't explicitly authorized it. And so after Civil Lady's opinions, you started getting government shutdowns the way we know

them now. How many have we had since then? There have been 15, including the current one. So how did government shutdowns go after that? There's this really bonkers shutdown that happened in 1982 under Reagan with Democrats in control of the House. They had agreed to a deal, but they both had social engagements. Democrats had a fundraiser and Reagan was hosting a barbecue at the White House. And so they just didn't want to pass the bill rather than doing that. So the government shut down briefly and then they got back together and passed it after they had done their barbecue.

I want to thank my good friend from California and the other good friends with him and his troop. Our barbecuers from Santa Maria, California, who came here all the way to barbecue. So it was like an accident, kind of? It was somehow worse than an accident because they knew it was going to happen and did it anyway. So if that's one of the more memorable, ridiculous ones, are there important memorable ones as well? Yeah, I think if I had to pick the three most important ones, I'd say that the first important one was in 1981 under Reagan, which is the first real government shutdown in which people were furloughed, about 240,000 people

were furloughed. The second one is actually two shutdowns technically, but they're so close together that I think it's useful to think of them as one, happened in 1995 to 1996 under Bill Clinton. And then I think the third one is October 2013 under Obama, the Obamacare shutdown. I remember that one. All right, let's go through them one by one. So starting with this 1981 shutdown under Reagan. Sure. Reagan comes into office, he wants big, sweeping domestic spending cuts. But he wanted to do this despite the House being in Democratic hands and being controlled by Tip O'Neill. The presidential veto would theoretically stop the machinery of government and perhaps force congressmen to spoil their Thanksgiving recess, getting it started again. So they clashed a lot

of the details. O'Neill wanted bigger defense cuts. He wanted civil service pay increases, and Reagan was not going to go along with that. So Reagan vetoed their offer on spending. The government wanted to shut down, and people got furloughed for the first time. That's almost to say, like, the first time the government realizes it really has this power.

This is just a few years after Carter and Civiletti. They're using it. Right. So it had been a completely like no cost negotiating chip before that. And now it became a sort of higher cost bargaining chip for these debates. Okay. The shutdown ended pretty quickly. They passed a continuing resolution. The government got funded again. But it was our first sort of taste of what this looks like in a modern sense. What's the next big important one?

That's Bill Clinton? Yeah, it's these two shutdowns in 95, beginning of 96. So 1994 midterms, Democrats get destroyed, lose both the House and Senate. Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole are now in charge of the House and Senate, respectively. And Gingrich, in particular, wants massive spending cuts. And so they send Clinton a spending bill that increases Medicare premiums, rolls back a bunch of environmental regulations, and includes a requirement that the budget be balanced within seven years.

Clinton vetoes that. The first shutdown happens. They reopen again to negotiate. Okay. And there's a debate over whether they should use economic forecasts for that from the Congressional Budget Office or the Office of Management and Budget, which is the executive branch's sort of equivalent agency working on budget numbers. Not quite as clear and blunt as, like, build the wall. It's like this engineering firm gets to build the wall

versus this other firm gets to build the wall. Like, it's the level of detail they're arguing about there. It was by far the longest shutdown until the current one. Previously, the longest shutdown had been three days. It was the first to really impact people a lot. Because it was so long, you had people missing paychecks in a way that you never had before. It's also historically important for two reasons. One is that it backfired really,

really badly on Gingrich. In the middle of it, he took a flight with Clinton and was complaining about how he was treated on the flight. You know, Bob, I simply can't believe he made us sit back here. You know, I just can't believe it. Yeah, I can't believe the size of these damn nuts. Damn outrage. Nothing but nut dust. Look at that.

Something about how he, like, didn't think he got a good enough seat or something. And the press just savaged him for this. Like, because it looked ridiculous. He'll pay for this when we get back to Washington. We'll shut down the whole damn government if we have to. That sounds good. It's like if you're announcing layoffs and then you're complaining that your first class cabin didn't have like good enough tomato juice in your Bloody Mary. The hot towels weren't hot enough.

That was bad for Gingrich. Ultimately, it was a very bad shutdown for Bill Clinton in that it wound up indirectly getting him impeached. How? One thing that happens during government shutdowns is that there are fewer paid professional workers around because non-essential personnel get sent home. And so at the time, unpaid interns in the office of the chief of staff, Leanne Panetta, named Monica Lewinsky, took on new responsibilities, was closer to the president, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, my gosh. Obviously, White House interns are no longer allowed to work during government shutdowns.

All right. So then we leave Clinton. And you said the next one of note was the Obamacare shutdown. It was a shutdown that the main congressional opposition leader to the president didn't really want to happen. John Boehner was House Speaker at this point. it was worth forcing the government shut down and worth engaging in sort of high stakes negotiating tactics with the White House in general in order to prevent Obamacare from coming into existence. This deal kicks the can down the road. It allows yet more debt, more deficits, more spending, and it does absolutely nothing to provide relief for the millions of Americans who are hurting because of Obamacare.

Cruz and his allies in the House get enough people in the House that it's clearly untenable for Boehner to pass a spending bill with majority Republican votes. At midnight last night, for the first time in 17 years, Republicans in Congress chose to shut down the federal government. It goes terribly for Republicans. And eventually it ends because Boehner passes a spending bill with mostly Democratic support, which he could have done all along, but he had this tradition he wanted to uphold. Basically total down the line defeat for Republicans, but also a kind of weakening of the speaker's position because Boehner didn't want this to happen.

It happened because there was sort of a revolt within his ranks. How many of these shutdowns were just totally partisan? So if you look at the two that we were just talking about, 95-96 and 2013, as well as the current one, there are these big partisan fights over major spending priorities. So 95-96 was about how do we balance the budget. 2013 was, do we have Obamacare? And the current one is, do we build the wall? And I think that's sort of a fitting escalation of what recent shutdowns have tended to be about. And the fact that they're so deeply partisan and the fact that they're about these sort of signature proposals of presidents helps explain why they go on for so long,

is that no one wants to really back down over those. Trump doesn't want to back down on the wall. Obama wasn't going to back down on funding Obamacare. I think people might be surprised to hear that there have been like 15 of these shutdowns. Do we learn anything from looking at all of them as you have? Do they usually hurt members of the House, members of the Senate, the president? Who looks the worst after a shutdown? It's hard to determine a real pattern there. Voters tend to have a pretty short attention span. Right now, we're about a year out from the January 2018 government shutdown. Yeah.

And I think there was a lot of speculation at the time that this would really hurt Democrats going into 2018. And it didn't at all, just because no one remembered. And the fact that there were a bunch under Reagan and then hardly any for 20 years, and now we've seen a few under the Trump administration, does this sort of mean that they might be back as some sort of tool of the government? I think it probably does. I think it was a really bad sign that there were two shutdowns under Trump, even though he controlled both houses of Congress. Trump was the first president in the era of the actual shutdown to have the government shut down despite unified control of government. That's really strange and shouldn't have happened.

We're seeing all parties involved come to the conclusion that it's not really that costly to keep the shutdown going on indefinitely. We've been shut down for over a month. It seems to be hurting Trump's poll numbers. But again, 2020 is a long way away. It's a while until his poll numbers really start hurting him. And it's starting to feel just like a fact of our lives that, you know, Oscars are coming up and Ariana Grande has a new song

and like the government shut down. I think that suggests to them that it's not really that costly to them to keep using shutdowns as a bargaining instrument. Precisely because this is the longest one that's ever happened. It's the most costly to humans that it's ever been. And I would be very surprised if it winds up hurting Trump at all. Dylan Matthews is the host of the Future Perfect podcast from Vox. It's about how to radically improve the world. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Thank you.