Who will blink first to end the government shutdown?

The surprising thing is not that the federal government has shut down. It would have been surprising if it did not. Each side thinks it has the cards and that it has put the other in a bad position. The result is that the budget feud could last for months, ending with a temporary armistice that satisfies no one.

There is little incentive for either side to shut down the shutdown. Washington Post columnist Paul Kane notes that most Senators have little reason to compromise: “very few senators feel the political pressure that usually comes with calamitous events like a federal agency shutdown. Most sit in safe seats, many with reelection campaigns a distant concern.”

Democrats are apparently reckoning that the suspension of health tax credits starting in December will cow Republican legislators into capitulating over the first shutdown since 2019. As the financier Steven Rattner points out in the New York Times, the GOP has effectively subverted ObamaCare by repealing the expensive tax breaks that prompted millions to enroll. Now some 20 million Americans face sharply higher premiums. According to Rattner, “Even upper-income Americans who buy insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges will be hurt by the repeal of this tax break. That’s because as coverage gets more expensive, healthier people drop their insurance first, forcing companies to raise premiums on their remaining customers to maintain profitability.” Democrats are wagering that enough Republican moderates will crack to ensure that they can reach a compromise to their liking.

President Trump and his advisors, however, believe that they can traumatize Democrats. As Trump put it, in a shutdown “we can get rid of a lot of things we don’t want, and they would be Democrat things.” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought has been preparing for that. This could be Vought’s finest hour, or, if you’re a fan of big government, the day of the jackal. “There are all manners of authorities to be able to keep this administration’s policy agenda moving forward,” Vought told Fox News, “and that includes reducing the size and scope of the federal government, and we will be looking for opportunities to do that.”

Vought resembles someone who was crafted in a laboratory by the Claremont Institute to overthrow the New Deal. He’s drafted plans to terminate wide swaths of the so-called administrative state, starting with many of the federal employees who are currently on administrative leave. One such emailed me on Tuesday evening to report that they are “hearing that the Office of Personnel and Management has orders to start jettisoning the Ballastexistenzen, or ballast existences, at midnight” – a sardonic reference to the Nazi propaganda term for those deemed unfit, undesirable and unnecessary.

The problems with the calculations of the Democrats might turn out to be twofold. The first is that Trump and his coterie exhibit little desire to keep the federal government humming. The reverse may be the case. Like a Romanov emperor, Trump wants to rule by ukase. If there are fewer federal employees around to obstruct his grand plans, so much the better. All Trump requires, so the thinking goes, is a functioning military and ICE. The rest can be cobbled together.

The second problem that could confound Democrats is the question of whether they really can remain united as they are called upon cast vote after vote to on Republican legislation to reopen government, or whether they are the ones who will crack, as they face calls to stop behaving like an obstructionist faction. Already three members of the Democratic caucus voted for the Republican plan on Tuesday night – Senators John Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto and Angus King. Fetterman observed that a shutdown would be “the ideal for Project 2025”.

Others remain undaunted. “They want us to blink first,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced on MSNBC. “We have to be the consequence.” No one should underestimate how consequential the shutdown may prove for Trump and his foes alike.