I’m Trying Something New This Month

Plus: How long will the government remain shut down?

Hi all,

Before we get to today’s newsletter, a quick note from me:

In two months, Wake Up To Politics will mark its 15th anniversary. If you had told me then that I would still be writing the newsletter now — and that it would one day be my full-time job — I would have in no way believed you. Does it feel strange to still be doing something at age 24 that I was doing at age nine? Sometimes. But at every stage, continuing on has just felt natural, in no small part because of all of you who have continued loyally reading.

Natural, also, because, in every way except the name, I’m really not doing the same thing I was doing at age nine: Wake Up To Politics has always changed and evolved (and, hopefully, improved), which has made it feel a lot more dynamic than just a plodding straight line from 2011 until now.

For most of the newsletter’s history, the goal was to put out a simple aggregation of the day’s headlines. (A late-night talk show even mocked how dry the writing was.) Over time, my vision for the newsletter has matured, with an eye more towards offering analysis to help you understand and navigate the day’s news — always striving to be non-partisan, but with a little bit more voice, perspective, and context. When I put out a survey last year and asked what parts of the newsletter readers found valuable, most of you said analysis pieces and deep-dive explainers; fewer of you said the simple news briefings that used to be WUTP’s bread and butter.

In that survey, I also asked how you would feel about shifting the cadence of the newsletter to three days a week. The response was mixed, and I’ll be honest: I feel mixed about it, too. But it’s something I want to try for the month of February. Here’s why:

While news aggregation lends itself more to a 5-days-a-week schedule, analysis columns are harder to do at that clip. Three columns a week will offer more time for me to give you the exact things you’ve said in surveys that you like best:

• More time to write and research big-picture analysis columns.

• More time for explainers and pieces that go deep on historical context.

• More time to cover events here in Washington and give you an inside view.

• More time to conduct interviews with interesting voices in the political arena.

• More time to record audio versions of the newsletter. (Try it out by clicking the “play” button above!)

In other words: more of the pieces that are quintessentially WUTP, less of what you can get elsewhere. I’m trying to go for quality over quantity, and I have some great ideas for deeper-dive projects I want to pursue that I think you will find interesting, but that are hard to produce on a five-columns-a-week schedule. As always, my goal is to be respectful of your time, to be sure that everything in your inbox is my best work: well-researched, well-sourced, well-edited, concise, informative, and fundamentally additive to your daily news consumption. I want to see whether three-days-a-week helps push closer to that goal.

I don’t need to tell you that these are complicated times, with a constant blur of headlines. That may seem like it’s a call for “more” — but I want to see whether it instead calls for journalism that’s “more well-thought-out,” pieces that take a step back, give the longer view, engage with nuance, and hopefully stick out from what you’re reading elsewhere. I know many of you are overwhelmed by the news cycle: I want to contribute to demystifying that, not to the feeling of inundation.

So, the plan for February is going to be Monday-Wednesday-Friday newsletters, with the Friday newsletter continuing to be special for paid subscribers (but also evolving in form as well). This is just an experiment! At the end of the month, I will send out a survey, and I want to hear from as many of you as possible about how you felt about the switch.

If you’re in any way considering unsubscribing because of this change, I hope you’ll hold off at least until the end of the month, since this is something I’m trying, not committing to making permanent. At the end of the day, maybe charting a middle ground between the current approach and the new approach will be the best path. Most of all, I hope you’ll let me know how you’re feeling over the next month, and whether WUTP is moving closer or farther to your vision of what you want out of the newsletter, which will always be the most important thing.

I’m excited to see what comes out of this. Thanks for your readership, and for your willingness to experiment!

— Gabe

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And now, for today’s newsletter:

The federal government is shut down, not that you would know it from glancing at the country’s largest newspapers. As of this writing, reporting on the funding gap is absent from the New York Times home page. Even the front page of this morning’s Washington Post, based in the city where the federal government is headquartered, relegated mention of the shutdown to a tiny box at the bottom of A1.

USA Today’s veteran Washington bureau chief, Susan Page, posits that this is because shutdowns have become so routinized (“just another day at the office,” as her headline puts it). It’s true that we were in a shutdown just two months ago — but I actually think stories like that exaggerate the frequency of shutdowns. In reality, there have only been three in the 21st century that have lasted longer than a weekend. (It would probably be a waste of resources to poll this question, but if such a survey was put into the field, I would be prepared to bet that many Americans think that we’ve had more than that, since news outlets often cover funding fights with a tone of “Here we go again.” In fairness, Congress is frequently coming right up against a shutdown deadline, but many Americans probably don’t realize that lawmakers usually avert them, or that the spending process is actually fairly bipartisan and functional, even this year.)

There’s also the fact that coverage of the appropriations fight — already a tough story to generate buzz about — has to compete with many other headlines, from the Grammys to the latest Epstein Files drop.

This is also only a partial shutdown, though that description doesn’t really do justice to the current situation. As we know, there are 12 appropriations bills that cover the U.S. government’s discretionary budget each year. (That is, the $1.6 trillion or so that is spent on programs requiring annual renewal, excluding the other $4 trillion spent on permanent programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.)

Six of them have already passed, which is why this is only a partial shutdown: agencies funded by those six bills are fully operating, while agencies funded by the six un-passed bills are shutting down.

But not every appropriations bill is created equal. In the below chart, each appropriations bill is shown according to how much of the discretionary budget they take up. Funded bills are green. Un-funded bills are gray. As you can see, the “partial” shutdown actually encompasses more than three-quarters of the government, including major agencies like the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury. (Notably, the Agriculture Department — which includes the food stamps program — is fully funded, taking a pivotal source of division from the last shutdown off the table this time.)

Finally, the most likely reason the current shutdown is receiving such little attention: Most people expect it won’t last long.

After all, there’s actually a bipartisan deal on the table to end the shutdown, fully fund 96% of the government, and temporarily fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for two weeks while the two parties negotiate potential ICE restrictions. That agreement easily passed the Senate, 71-29, on Friday; the White House has given its blessing, as has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who negotiated the accord in a surprise phone call with President Trump last week.

But Trump and Schumer forgot to clue in the House, which must now pass the package before it can become law. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was originally planning to pass the measure today under a procedure known as “suspension of the rules,” which allows a piece of legislation to be fast-tracked in the House — as long as it receives support from two-thirds of the chamber.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) quickly made it be known that he wasn’t on board with Schumer’s deal and that he won’t vote to extend DHS funding, even for two weeks. That means that a vote will have to be held tomorrow instead, following the chamber’s normal procedures — except Johnson is also facing opposition from a group of House Republicans who don’t like the Senate deal either. (It all brings to mind an old Capitol Hill saw, about the freshman House Democrat who referred to the other party as “the enemy.” No, a more senior colleague told him: “House Republicans aren’t the enemy. They’re the opposition. The enemy is the Senate.”)

In the House, if the rules aren’t being suspended, they have to be reckoned with. Thus, the chamber will have to vote on a “special rule” (often just called a “rule”), which sets up the structure of floor consideration (how many hours of debate a bill will get, how many amendments will be voted on, etc.) before voting on the bill itself.

This could cause some issues.

The tradition in the House — even if it doesn’t always make sense, as I’ve noted before — is that members of the minority party vote against a “rule” no matter what, even if they support the underlying legislation. In this case, there might not be enough Democrats to get the bill above the two-thirds threshold, after Jeffries and House Homeland Security Committee ranking member Bennie Thompson (D-MS) announced their opposition. But there are Democrats who reportedly plan to support the funding deal, including former leadership mainstays Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Jim Clyburn (D-SC).

On a rule vote, though, it doesn’t matter: all Democrats will vote against the procedural vote in lockstep. That means Johnson needs to keep his Republicans united on the vote tomorrow; as usual, he has almost no margin for error. In fact, his margin is shrinking, after Democrats won a special election on Saturday in a safe-blue Texas seat. Rep.-elect Christian Menefee (D-TX) is expected to be sworn in today; once he is, the House will be split 218-214, which means Johnson will only be able to lose one Republican on party-line votes.

Right now, there are several Republicans threatening to vote “no” on the funding deal. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) never votes for spending packages, basically as a rule. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) is saying that she will join him unless the SAVE Act, which would require individuals to provide proof of citizenship before registering to vote, is attached to the package. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) has told NOTUS that he will oppose the plan because he does not like that it carves out DHS to be funded only temporarily.

If more than one of them vote against the package on the procedural “rule” vote tomorrow, it won’t be able to advance, extending the partial shutdown.

Generally, Johnson is able to corral his dissenting members — with some help from House Majority Whip Donald Trump — though it usually costs him. Ahead of a rule vote on government funding last month, for example, a group of Midwestern Republicans threatened to object until language was added making E15 (ethanol-based biofuel) available for year-round purchase. Johnson ultimately agreed to set up a council of House Republicans to look into the issue. On the same vote, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) threatened to object unless a provision was made to offer more H-2B guest worker visas. Perhaps relatedly, the Trump administration said this weekend that it would double the number of H-2B visas, a shift that isn’t exactly in line with his normal immigration policy.

With an election year on the horizon, and his margin getting slimmer, votes like these are only getting harder for Johnson. In a one-vote majority, every Republican has leverage to try to squeeze concessions out of him (or Trump) on their policy priorities.

And so, the partial shutdown will last at least until tomorrow, and potentially longer, if Johnson fails to cobble together enough Republicans to advance the package.

During the last shutdown, I wrote about hypothetical ways that government shutdowns could be ended forever, from provisions that would implement an automatic “continuing resolution” if appropriations lapse to Attorney General Pam Bondi hypothetically rescinding the 1980 Justice Department memo that created shutdowns in the first place.

How to End Shutdowns Forever

All of the solutions I mentioned come with downsides, but I do think the conversation is worth having in light of our current situation, where the government is (partially) shut down because of logistics and process as much as due to any policy disagreement. (It’s also worth revisiting the congressional tradition of minority party members opposing rule votes, even for bills that they agree with, which could prolong this shutdown if Johnson has trouble getting his Republicans in line and Democrats who back the funding deal refuse to lend a hand.)

Even when they’re brief, shutdowns can still have consequences. If the shutdown lasts to the end of the week, it might mess with the January jobs report, which is supposed to come out on Friday. At the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), more than 10,000 workers are being furloughed. Before long, employees across the government will start missing paychecks.

It’s another reminder that process factors — from differences between the House and Senate to special elections to congressional traditions about procedural votes — can drive policy outcomes.