DEMS STRIVE TO STICK TOGETHER There’s still a month to go, but Capitol Hill is girding for an appropriations breakdown — and Democrats are already strategizing over how to make Republicans pay for what some have already started calling a “MAGA shutdown.” Their challenge: Maximizing the GOP political pain while avoiding blame themselves. After all, it has been a full 10 years since the government has shut down with a Democrat in the White House. And this time, the president needs to win reelection in 14 months. “This is really going to be driven by the House,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) told reporters in the Capitol on Friday. “They're the ones that are going to bring [a shutdown] upon the country.” To be sure, top House Democrats are still hoping to avoid a shutdown, and the party’s rank-and-file stands ready to approve a bipartisan deal — preferably a clean stopgap with some amount of Ukraine and disaster aid attached, likely sent over from the Senate. But the key funding decisions lie with Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his capricious Republican conference, and putting a deal along those lines up for a vote could prove disastrous to McCarthy’s standing as leader. With members of the hard-right Freedom Caucus escalating their threats, Democratic leaders want their members to stay unified around a message decrying GOP hostage-taking and accusing Republicans of reneging on a bipartisan deal on spending caps reached in May. A solid Democratic front, the thinking goes, will squeeze Republicans from districts won by President Joe Biden and force McCarthy to the negotiating table. Absent that pressure, “I don't think there's a lot of hope that Kevin McCarthy for once will actually stand up to the far right,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). Dems have their own internal politics to worry about, with some on the left privately anxious that Biden, the consummate Washington dealmaker, might try to negotiate with the GOP if a shutdown drags on. That, they fear, could result in further cuts to the spending levels agreed to earlier this year (or worse, a GOP win on border funding). And there are some Democrats — particularly from the D.C. suburbs — who are generally skittish about any shutdown. But even that Maryland and Virginia bloc, who represent thousands of federal employees who will be affected by even a brief federal funding lapse, aren’t in any mood to give anything up on Republicans’ funding demands. “The Freedom Caucus has once again approached the funding of government as a hostage-taking opportunity,” Connolly said. “We're not going to agree to that kind of hostage taking.” Added Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), “We're supposed to be the leader of the world, the shining city on the hill and all that great stuff. And what does it tell the world when we can't even keep our own government open?” Preparation has begun: Multiple Hill offices have already begun sorting out which staff are essential and reviewing how to handle constituent concerns over everything from Medicare checks to national parks. (Even the Congressional Federal Credit Union has made resources available, including lines of credit.) Ghosts of shutdowns past: Plenty in the party are still scarred by the politically painful shutdown in early 2018 over Dreamers, for which even some Democrats believe they took the blame. But others insist it’d be more reminiscent of the 35-day lapse later that year — when then-president Donald Trump actually agreed to “own” the shutdown over his border fall. Meanwhile in the Freedom Caucus: In a phone call last week, Rep. Bob Good (R-Va) offered a preview of how conservatives would try to pin the situation on Democrats: “If this Republican majority does its job in passing these [spending] bills, the Senate and White House should not choose to shut down the government. But the House should not fear that and should not preemptively cave to that fear.” — Sarah Ferris and Nicholas Wu, with reporting from Burgess Everett
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