Failed strategies should be abandoned

Ezra Klein — who reluctantly accepted the arguments for funding the government in March — argues that events have shown that doing it again would ne a huge mistake [gift link]:

Not a single argument Schumer made then is valid now. First, Trump is not losing in the Supreme Court, which has weighed in again and again on his behalf. Instead of reprimanding Trump for his executive order unilaterally erasing the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to all born here, it reprimanded the lower courts for imposing a national freeze on his order in the way they did. It has shown him extraordinary deference to the way he is exercising power. I recently asked Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, what powers the recent Supreme Court decisions seem to grant Trump that Barack Obama or Joe Biden just didn’t think they had when they were president.

Here’s what she said: “Refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. Remove heads of independent agencies protected by statute from summary firing. Fire civil servants without cause. Dismantle federal agencies. Call up the National Guard on the thinnest of pretexts. That’s a preliminary half-dozen powers.”

Obama and Biden, she added, “didn’t think they had the power to disregard statutes passed by Congress and the text of the Constitution. They didn’t think they had the power to do things like treat the presidency as an office that permits its occupant to use the power of the state to reward friends and punish enemies and engage in self-dealing and enrichment.”

Schumer’s argument in March was that the courts were stopping Trump; let them do their work. What we can say in September is that no, John Roberts is not going to stop Donald Trump.

Second, the scale of DOGE’s assault on the government has shrunk. Trump and Elon Musk went through a messy and public breakup. But the real reason it didn’t continue, I suspect, is that it’s Trump appointees running these agencies now. They don’t want their own agencies wrecked. They don’t want to be blamed for the failures that might result. They need staff. And either way, the Supreme Court has given Trump vast power to reshape the federal work force in the way he chooses. He doesn’t need a shutdown to do it.

Third, the markets have settled into whatever this new normal is, at least for now. Trump’s tariffs are unpopular, but what damage they have done to him politically they have already done or they will do over time, as price increases squeeze Americans. We are not in a recession. The economy is not in chaos. Democrats cannot stand back and hope the markets will do their work for them.

But something else has changed, too. We are no longer in the muzzle velocity stage of this presidency. We are in the authoritarian consolidation stage of this presidency.

I don’t have an answer to Paul’s important questions about what to do beyond politics given things like Trump posting AI slop to justify the military invasion of Chicago. But in terms of politics, “do not allow things to continue as is with only minor or no or concessions (let alone counterproductive ‘concessions’)” should pretty clearly not be an option at this point.