By Carlo Versano

Copyright newsweek

Editor’s note: This is a preview of The 1600, Newsweek’s daily newsletter where politics and culture director Carlo Versano makes sense of Beltway politics for people outside the Beltway.

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The Insider’s Track

Good morning,

My daughter just got her first homework assignment. Homework! She’s four years old. Doesn’t that seem a little soon? They call it “extended activity time” now, btw, a nice little euphemism. Why do we force them to grow up so fast?

President Trump posted a particularly insane AI-generated video on his socials last night showing deepfaked versions of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the latter wearing a Mexican sombrero and mustache, talking about how the Democrats love illegal immigrants and want to give them free healthcare. Just judging by that, it’s probably safe to assume the 11th-hour talks between Congressional Dems and the White House did not go well and we’re headed toward a government shutdown tonight at midnight. Yippee.

The basic contours of this shutdown showdown are as follows. Dem leadership has been pilloried by Dem voters for rolling over and not standing up to Trump. Earlier this year, Schumer whipped Dems into supporting a continuing resolution to keep the gov’t open through Sept. 30 (today), arguing that shutting it down would just enable Elon Musk and DOGE to take a machete to the federal bureaucracy even more than they were already doing. Schumer made the right — dare I say, brave — call there, but he got killed for it with the base. Now he and Jeffries are standing firm as we approach the new deadline — demanding that any funding extension also extends the Obamacare subsidies that expire at the end of the year, as well as Medicaid cuts passed in the Big, Beautiful Bill (BBB).

The GOP is spinning that as Democrats trying to extend healthcare coverage to illegal immigrants, which is misleading at best, because people in the country illegally are already barred from federally funded healthcare — whether its Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP or Obamacare. The BBB does cut Obamacare subsidies for groups of “lawfully present” immigrants — ie. Dreamers, refugees, asylees — which the Dems are trying to restore. So the battle lines make sense, politically, in that each side is prepared to shut down the government over issues they see as salient to their voters. Dems want this to be about standing firm on healthcare, the GOP wants this to be a fight about immigration.

Nate Silver made what I thought was a pretty cogent argument, writing in the Times last week that if Democrats want this shutdown fight, they should make it about Trump’s tariffs rather than Obamacare subsidies, as the tariffs are his worst issue heading into the midterms and one of the few things that actually move his poll numbers. Silver’s idea is that Schumer and Jeffries should condition a deal to keep the gov’t open on passage of this bipartisan bill called the Trade Review Act, which codifies Congress’ role to “regulate commerce with foreign nations” that the White House has been ignoring by unilaterally wielding the threat of tariffs against our allies and trading partners.

The other argument against pinning this on ACA subsidies is that Dems are picking a “normal” fight in “not normal” times. Why not just say to Republicans: you guys control the entire federal government, figure it out. We aren’t negotiating with you on this or anything else for that matter. Trump is so far off the reservation and you (Congressional Republicans) have completely abdicated your job in acting as a check on executive power. So if you need the votes, blow up the filibuster — one of the few remaining guardrails left in our democracy — and show the American people your fealty to Trump outweighs your fealty to the country. That’s probably the argument I would have gone with if I were in Dem leadership, as it would be principled as well as motivating to the base, ahead of a midterm election in which turnout will determine whether Dems can take back the House and provide their own check on Trump.

The problem with both of these arguments is that it requires an opposition party that is savvy, disciplined and on-message from the top down, which the Democrats are … uh… not. The other problem is that this is probably a trap, and the Ds are walking right into it. The Trump administration is happy for a shutdown because it’s going to give them political cover to exact more deep cuts to the federal workforce under the guise of temporary furloughs. We’ll just lay these “non-essential” workers off, and not bring them back once funding is restored. They can sue, but we have a get-out-of-jail free card with the SCOTUS to do whatever we want. It’s a “heads we…