OPINION:
In a rare act of actual journalism, the far-left CNN host Jake Tapper recently acknowledged that it was really the Democrats who shut down the federal government, despite weeks of breathless reporting from the liberal network saying just the opposite.
“Democrats are the ones that are not voting to fund the government,” Mr. Tapper said frankly last week as the shutdown dragged on. “The messaging by Democrats around this shutdown has been sharper than I’ve seen Democrats on any issue in a long time. They have convinced voters, Democratic voters and independent voters, that it’s the Republicans’ fault.”
“And just on the numbers, that might not be actually accurate in terms of who’s voting to open the government and who isn’t,” the host said.
Let’s all pause and take a “duh” pill. Duh. All Republicans in the Senate, except for Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, repeatedly voted to fund the federal budget and keep the government open. All 47 Democrats and independents consistently voted against a continuing resolution — 14 times, in fact. The effort needed 60 votes to advance, so it continued to fail until seven Democrats and an independent changed their votes.
But that’s how the game is played. Democrats claimed they were trying hard to keep the government open, and their lapdog media parroted the talking point. Why? Because voters normally blame Republicans for government shutdowns, and it is, frankly, good politics for Democrats, who couldn’t care less about the American people.
For instance, an NBC News poll released two days before Election Day found that a majority of voters, 52%, blamed either President Trump or congressional Republicans for the shutdown, while 42% blamed congressional Democrats.
It worked. On Election Day, Democratic candidates prevailed in key races in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City. And days later, the Democrats packed it in, effectively ending the shutdown after more than 40 days, the longest in history.
It was all by design. “If you’re the Democrats, you’re looking at it thinking, you know, having 40 days of the Republicans being a little tangled up and not being able to do stuff congressionally, that’s not a problem. That’s a good thing,” Republican strategist and former Trump White House official Mike McKenna told the Daily Caller.
Make no mistake, it was the Democrats who caused all the pain — leaving 42 million people dependent on food stamps hanging, bringing airports across the nation to a standstill and leaving millions of federal workers unpaid and uninsured.
Scott Jennings, who served as a special assistant to President George W. Bush and is now a political strategist, cut to the quick in an appearance on CNN.
“The other thing that came out is that Democrats are willing to make people suffer. We heard Democrat after Democrat say, ‘We just couldn’t prolong the suffering.’ So they admit their political tactics were designed to inflict suffering on the American people. We learned about cynical politics,” he said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who looks like a dead man walking these days, made just that quite clear when he said the quiet part out loud. “Every day gets better for us,” he told Punchbowl News on Oct. 9, a month before the shutdown would end.
“Every time they try something, it doesn’t quite work,” Mr. Schumer said. “Even the threat of shutting things — ‘We’re gonna close this, we’re gonna close that.’ It’s [reflecting] at least as negative on them as it is on us. I think more so on them.”
“Even the pain that’s caused — the data we have seen and just talking to people, they blame Trump. When things are actually shut down, they blame Trump. When things aren’t happening, they blame Trump. Because he’s in charge. You don’t need a political science Ph.D. to understand they control everything,” the career politician said.
So he knew, the Democrats knew, that the government shutdown was always about inflicting the most pain possible, with, of course, the knowledge that the media would tell the American people that Republicans were really to blame. After the elections, and with the very real possibility that they might start getting some of the blame, too, the Democrats decided to bail.
After all that, what did the Democrats get? Absolutely nothing. There’s a vague agreement that the Senate will vote on extending outlandish subsidies to the disastrous Affordable Care Act — subsidies that President Biden and congressional Democrats agreed should sunset at the end of 2025. There’s no chance the COVID-19-era subsidies, expected to cost taxpayers $150 billion next year, will be renewed.
So Democrats shut down the government to win a couple of elections. They caused completely unnecessary agony for millions and millions of Americans, for nothing.
Remember that when you go to the polls in November 2026. And remember the party that “takes the government hostage” to advance its political aims “almost never succeeds.”
And that’s not from Fox News; that’s from The Washington Post.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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