Kate Riga and I just finished recording this week’s edition of the podcast. We’ll add a link when it’s published. We devoted most of the episode to the coming budget showdown, what should happen and what’s going to happen (not necessarily or perhaps likely the same things). There was one point we discussed that I wanted to share with you here.
We have a whole debate about what Democrats should to with this continuing resolution. A lot of that debate centers on what even Democrats would be trying to achieve — make a point, get specific policy concessions. But there’s an entirely different question that informs a lot of it for me. What kind of Democratic leadership you have right now is the best indication of the type you’ll have in divided government in 2027-28 if Democrats win control of one or both houses of Congress in the midterms. It’s the best indication of what kind of governance we’d see in a Democratic trifecta in 2029, if such a thing came to pass.
The corollary to that observation is that you’re not going to go from the March 2025 Democratic Party to something dramatically different when Democrats get some actual power. This is obvious but important to focus on. The muscles and muscle memory Democratic elected officials will need in power are going to be built in opposition.
Which brings me to a more general point.
The system all of us were raised in has been shattered. It can’t be reinstituted. You will have to build a new system which blocks the paths to this kind of dictatorial presidency. That’s going to be really hard. It will start by requiring a flurry of new laws to prune the statute book of the laws which genuinely give a president open-ended and generally unreviewable paths to big power grabs. It will absolutely require abolishing the filibuster. It will require breaking the power of the corrupt Supreme Court majority.
In the last case, there are various ways to do that. My preference would be to reorganize the court as something more like the appellate courts where you have more judges and different groupings of them which sit in different cases. The new judges and all judges going forward would sit for 10-year terms, which could be renewed by reappointment. That’s simply my preference. That specific approach is irrelevant. What’s incredibly relevant is that you cannot get back from where we are now with this Supreme Court and its corruption. They have decided that the Constitution allows dictatorial rule under Republican presidents.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. These are simply some of the steps that will be necessary to build a new system of civic democratic government on the shattered ruins of the old one.
If you are this worried about a two- or three-month budget standoff and shutdown that you may take some short-term political hit from, you aren’t going to have the stomach to do any of those things. And if you’re not, this new system in creation under Trump II is not going anywhere. We need elected officials who are as ruthless on behalf of civic democracy as their opposites are on behalf of authoritarianism.
One argument for the Chuck Schumer crowd — probably their primary argument — goes like this. Trump is unpopular and getting more unpopular. We’re in a good position to pick up at least the House, and the Senate is becoming increasingly plausible if not yet likely. We don’t want a shutdown, which is unpopular and unpredictable. Why would we give Trump a shot and changing the trajectory of the midterms? Things are going our way.
This is not nearly as bad an argument as many seem to think. There’s a very decent chance the anti-Trump backlash will be so big the Dems will win anyway regardless of what they do. The question I have is what kind of opposition in power you’re going to have? How focused will it be? How fierce a fight will they put up? The muscles and habits the anti-Trump opposition will have in 2027 with a Democratic Congress or in 2029 with a Democratic presidency will be the muscles and habits they learn and start acting on now.