Opinion - The House is stumbling toward another shutdown — and another Trump loss

Donald Trump must be trying to lose.

And I don’t just mean Trump, but JD Vance, the House Freedom Caucus and the insular world of “make-America-great-again” influencers. Every day brings a new foolish act. They can’t really be this dumb, can they?

After all the buffoonery of the last year, Trump and his putative allies in the House have finally figured out how to irrevocably wreck his candidacy and potentially nuke the House Republican majority — a perfectly timed government shutdown.

Government shutdowns have never worked out for Republicans. The first “successful” shutdown in 1995 was a disaster, failing not only to achieve policy gains for the GOP but also sinking the party’s chances of winning the presidency and thus the administrative state.

Before Newt Gingrich started down the shutdown path, Republican nominee Bob Dole was between even and ahead in the polls against then-President Bill Clinton. After the shutdown, Dole never led again. It was a colossal blown opportunity for the first conservative Congress in decades, during a time when smaller government and fiscal discipline were popular.

Ever since that debacle, so-called principled conservatives (really, egocentric grandstanders) have been opportunistically engaging in government shutdown politics for zero political benefit. Like clockwork, they wait until Democrats are in power and try to negotiate from a position of political weakness. Shockingly, it never works.

Freedom Caucus members and their fellow travelers seem determined to keep trying over and over to make this strategy work, like bad roulette players who go broke betting that same losing number again and again — it just has to hit sometime, right? The only benefit, though, is facetime on conservative cable news and fundraising letters. Perhaps it’s all performance art.

To be sure, there is plenty to complain about and reform in the federal government. Massive spending, tortoise-like approval processes, policy overreach, overregulation and lack of responsiveness are all significant problems. But you have to win power to address these issues, and you have to have a plan to do it. The preschoolers in the Freedom Caucus can’t seem to figure that out.

The only time Republicans pursued a shutdown while holding the presidency was under Trump. After his polling numbers dropped, he caved and got nothing out of it.

Too bad for Trump he never learns, and has thrown in with this lose-at-all-costs crowd. According to media reports, Trump somehow thinks linking the SAVE Act (which requires American citizenship to vote) to any government funding bill is a political masterstroke.

Not even close.

It is true that requiring voters be American citizens is highly popular with the public; referenda have passed overwhelmingly in states including Florida (79 percent), Ohio (76 percent), and even Democrat-controlled Colorado (more than 62 percent). But that doesn’t mean voters are willing to deal with a government shutdown over such a bill. Government shutdowns affect people in the present, whereas a citizenship voting bill is something for the future. That’s not a good recipe when you need votes in the next few weeks.

Worse for Trump, this showdown can easily be framed as a last-minute stunt on an issue that should have been a major focus of House Republicans for the past year. Since having a majority in the House means absolute control over the agenda — that is, what bills are voted on and when — the GOP could have easily put forward a citizenship voting bill in 2023, or even a constitutional amendment. They could have held hearings and made it a central part of a robust policy agenda.

But the House and the incompetent Reps. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) were too busy failing to impeach President Biden to force the Democrats into a box on voter security and a whole host of other issues. As a result, the House voted for a buried SAVE Act in July, with voter attention crowded out by the national conventions, the first Trump assassination attempt and Biden’s withdrawal.

Yes, it’s a lot of theater, but that’s politics. Clearly Trump and Vance don’t understand how that part of politics works.

Just this week Vance tried to explain away Senate Republicans torpedoing an in-vitro fertilization protection bill, calling it a “show” vote. It was a “show” vote, all right — it showed the political incompetence of the Republicans and Trump-Vance.

The 2024 election has been Trump’s to lose for the last year. Harris is still stuck with Biden’s record and public approval of that record is terrible. Biden remains net negative on every major issue except health care, where he is up by just 1 point. He remains down by 25 points on his handling of inflation. The RealClearPolitics polling average on the direction of the country is net negative, by nearly 33 points.

Yet despite this issue environment overwhelmingly favorable to Trump, he is locked into a toss-up race. In the Electoral College, when you include states where Trump or Harris have at least a 1-point polling lead, Harris leads narrowly at 236 to 230 votes. On the national ballot test, Harris leads by 2 points, up 1 point in the aftermath of Trump’s unsurprisingly awful debate performance.

Trump has managed to stumble and fumble his way into what is practically a dead heat. Given his undisciplined behavior, message mismanagement and terrible campaign, it would seem he can’t go any lower. The ex-president would have to have a truly bravura screw-up to lose any more ground. Fortunately for Harris, Trump and his incompetent allies in the House may well be planning just such a mess.

Keith Naughton is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm, and a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant.

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