Schumer Shutdown?

For much of the past week, I've been looking at a business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style as it's manifested in both his business and political careers, looking mainly at the issue of Canadian tariffs. But all of a sudden, we're getting a new case study, the House's passage of a continuing resolution, which needed only a simple majority, but now it's moved to the Senate, which needs a 60-vote supermajority to pass a procedural vote.

Trump had a bare majority of Republicans in the House, which he was able to control for the vote. But while he has 53 Republicans in the Senate, he doesn't have the 60-vote supermajority he needs.

Following Tuesday night’s vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced the lower chamber of Congress would recess until March 24, leaving Schumer with the option of accepting the House bill and keeping the federal lights on over the objection of progressive activists, or rejecting it and putting the nation’s capital on course for the 11th partial government shutdown since 1980.

In a statement after the lower chamber passed the funding bill, Johnson said it was “decision time for Senate Democrats: Cast a vote to keep the government open or be responsible for shutting it down.”

While Trump has so far left almost all the public statements on the negotiation to Speaker Johnson, the circumstances as they've developed have Trump's fingerprints all over them. First, as we've seen, Trump's preference is to negotiate with those who have few or no options. The House passed the continuing resolution and then promptly adjourned, with the members going home. Per The Hill,

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) sent the House home after the chamber passed the GOP six-month CR mostly along party lines on Tuesday. The House isn’t slated to be back until March 24, leaving Senate Democrats few options beyond eating the GOP’s stopgap measure or allowing the government to shut down.

Neither is palatable to them.

With the shutdown deadline Friday midnight, there's no practical opportunity to call the House back to try to modify the continuing resolution, so the Democrats have only two choices, keep the government open under its terms or shut it down. At the New York Post link above,

Before the Senate convened for Wednesday business, Democrats huddled during a caucus lunch to plot the next steps forward.

. . . “I’ve gone back and forth on this thing three times because it is two horrible choices,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) admitted to reporters before the lunch.

“If you shut down the government, the president is the person who decides what is essential,” Hickenlooper explained. “He decides what part of the government stays open, so you are actually giving him even more power.”

As the business-school analysis points out, "the importance of knowing one’s alternatives has received significant attention in the negotiation literature (e.g., Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991), and Trump, during the 2016 presidential campaign, likewise advocated having a viable 'walk‐away' option (Trump 2016c)." In this case, as the Democrats acknowledge, Trump wins with either outcome, but he also has another benefit that he's known for exercising:

If his counterparts do have options, he uses threats to denigrate the value of these alternatives, thus presenting them with a structured choice: either accept his offer (which, as performer, he promotes with his typical bravado), or face his unpredictable ire (disrupter). Accepting Trump’s offer often puts the other parties in his debt, and he can be expected to threaten retribution if they do not reciprocate (disrupter).

According to The Hill at the link,

What also spooks members is the unknown of what comes after a shutdown starts. Trump is well known for being unpredictable, and how he handles a shutdown is giving Democrats heartburn.

A shutdown would put the Office of Management and Budget in charge of determining what personnel are considered essential and nonessential during its course. Senate Republicans could also hypothetically force vote after vote to reopen the government, giving them further headaches in the process.

“It’s the devil that we know against the devil that we don’t know,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said.

According to Politico,

Senate Democrats haven’t even surrendered yet on a government shutdown — but already White House officials are gloating about making them eat crow, almost taunting them to vote “no.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threw down the gauntlet Wednesday, proclaiming that Republicans don’t have the 60 votes needed to keep the government open past Friday. But President Donald Trump and senior White House officials are increasingly confident Schumer will release enough centrists to put up the votes for passage, according to multiple White House officials I spoke to over the past 24 hours.

. . . In some ways, the White House’s posture smacks of over-confidence bordering on arrogance. During most face-offs like this — when an administration needs the votes of the opposition party for must-pass legislation — there’s typically some sort of outreach, even by the president himself.

Not so with Trump. Instead of extending an olive branch this week, the president used his Oval Office bilateral meeting with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin to attack Schumer in vicious personal terms, saying he’s “no longer Jewish” and calling him a Palestinian.

And despite the fact that they need eight Senate Democrats to back this measure for passage, the White House hasn’t bothered to contact any so far.

Politico here seems to think this is something new or unusual, but the business-school analysis suggests that Trump is being consistent with strategies he's developed over his multiple careers. What's changed is that Trump now has Republican leadership in the House and Senate that he can work with. As Ed Kilgore put it in The Intelligencer,

Like most observers, I vacillate regularly as to whether House Speaker Mike Johnson is an unexpectedly shrewd legislative tactician or is instead Mr. Magoo, a bumbling backwoods pol who survives strictly by blind luck and subservience to Donald Trump. But as Congress moves this week toward a possible government shutdown, there are fresh signs that Johnson knows what he’s doing — or at least is listening to advisers or executive-branch paymasters who know what they are doing. He’s devising a trap for congressional Democrats that is leaving them irresolute and possibly more powerless than ever.

A big difference between Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0 is that he no longer has to deal with Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, or Mitch McConnell. We still know very little about ju;st what Trump accomplished even when he was out of office.