The Democrats Are Winning the Shutdown — And Here's Why It Matters for 2026
In almost every case, the most reasonable position wins, and the party in charge loses
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There’s an old rule in American politics that almost never fails: whoever is in charge takes the blame. It doesn’t matter if the nuances favor you. It doesn’t matter if your argument is technically correct. Most Americans aren’t tracking the procedural chess match happening on the Senate floor — they’re stuck in a four-hour TSA line at Hartsfield-Jackson, watching ICE agents try to figure out how to staff an airport checkpoint, and asking themselves one simple question: who did this?
The answer, right now, is Republicans. They control the Senate. They control the House. They have the White House. When the government doesn’t work, the people running the government own it. Full stop.
And the Democrats, for once, are playing this exactly right.
Let’s go back to 2013. Republicans shut down the federal government over defunding the Affordable Care Act (this was a miserable time for me…I opposed the shutdown and had “fun” explaining to the base why) — a law that, at the time, had become genuinely popular with the American public. They picked a fight on unfavorable terrain, lost badly, and handed Democrats a messaging gift that kept giving for months. The lesson was obvious: if you’re going to draw a line in the sand, make sure the sand isn’t under your own feet.
The Democrats of 2026 appear to have actually learned that lesson.
Their demands in this DHS standoff are not insane: a mask ban for federal agents, judicial warrant reform, and a universal code of conduct on use of force. These aren’t radical asks. These are accountability measures — the kind of thing most Americans, regardless of party, would nod along to if you read them the list. Federal agents should show their faces. They should get warrants. They shouldn’t be allowed to shoot people without consequences. That’s not a leftist manifesto. That’s basic rule-of-law stuff.
Compare that to the Republican position, which has evolved from “fund ICE or nothing” to an increasingly desperate two-step scramble — fund almost all of DHS in one bill, then try to jam ICE funding through the filibuster-proof reconciliation process, while also attempting to attach pieces of the SAVE America Act, a controversial voter ID bill that all Democrats oppose.
That’s not a governing strategy. That’s a hostage situation dressed up in parliamentary procedure.
Here’s the thing the GOP hasn’t fully reckoned with: the DHS shutdown didn’t start in a vacuum. It began in February after Democrats said they could not fund ICE following the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by DHS personnel in separate incidents.
Two Americans. Killed by federal agents. In Minneapolis.
Democrats aren’t blocking ICE funding because they want open borders. They’re blocking it because they want accountability for agencies that killed American citizens and apparently answered to no one. When you frame it that way — and Democrats should be framing it that way, loudly and constantly — you’re not fighting on the fringe. You’re fighting for something most Americans actually care about: that the government doesn’t get to kill you without consequence.
Meanwhile, the TSA call-out rate neared 12 percent on Sunday, with more than 3,450 agents not showing up to work — and at some major airports like New Orleans and Atlanta, more than 40 percent of agents called out. Those are real numbers with real consequences for real people trying to catch flights home. And who’s taking the heat for that? The party that controls the government.
Then Trump, in a moment of genuinely spectacular political miscalculation, proposed sending ICE agents to airports to do security screening. Sen. Richard Blumenthal called it “another reckless, lawless threat to misuse ICE agents,” adding that “America would be absolutely appalled to see ICE agents roaming through airports, just as they’ve been breaking down doors at homes.” He’s right. And every American who saw that image — masked ICE agents with “POLICE” on their vests running around at airport security checkpoints doing nothing — got a visceral reminder of exactly what this fight is about.
One of the biggest political mistakes the Republican Party made over the last decade was going to the wall on everything. Every bill. Every vote. Every procedural motion. The debt ceiling. Government funding. Even basic housekeeping legislation became an ideological battleground. The result was exhaustion — among the public, among their own members, and ultimately in electoral losses when voters decided they just wanted the government to function. (We were held hostage by the tea party and freedom caucus, a lesson I will expand on someday.)
Democrats appear to be picking their battles. They’re not blocking everything. They’re not demanding the moon. They’re saying: fund TSA, fund FEMA, fund the Coast Guard — we’re not holding those hostage. Schumer went to the floor and said it plainly: “Let us keep negotiating the outstanding issues with ICE, but let us start sending paychecks to TSA workers now.”
That’s a surgically precise political position. It says: we want the government to work. We just refuse to give a blank check to an agency that killed two Americans. How do you argue against that on the Sunday shows?
You can’t. And the Republicans know it. Even Fox News noted the irony: “Ironically, this idea would mirror what Democrats have tried to do on multiple occasions. Democrats have asked unanimous consent on the floor to pass bills to fund DHS — sans ICE. So, Republicans have come around to the position that this is the only way out of this cul-de-sac — even if it reflects the Democratic position.”
Read that again. Fox News acknowledged that Republicans are now basically adopting the Democratic position and calling it a win. That’s how you know the messaging battle has been won.
Sen. Brian Schatz, widely seen as the Democrat leader-in-waiting, put it bluntly: the Democrats are “positively serene” about TSA getting paid.
That quote is going to age well.
Serene is exactly the right posture when you’re holding the stronger political hand. You don’t need to yell. You don’t need to negotiate against yourself. You just keep offering the same clean vote — fund everything except the agency with the accountability problem — and let the Republicans explain to America why they keep saying no.
Senate Democrats offered that unanimous consent vote to fund TSA eight separate times. Eight times. And Republicans blocked it eight times. Every single one of those votes is a campaign ad. Every single one of them is a piece of evidence in the case Democrats will make in 2026: we wanted to reopen the government. They said no.
The midterms are coming. Every seat in the House is up. A third of the Senate. And the Democrats are building a record right now — not of obstruction, but of selective, principled resistance on popular ground.
That’s a fundamentally different posture than the Republican approach of the last decade, which often felt like burning everything down to make a point. Democrats are demonstrating something that sounds boring but is actually essential: the desire to govern. Not to blow it all up. Not to use every lever of dysfunction as a fundraising tool. To actually make the government work, except when the government is being used to do something genuinely wrong.
That’s a winning message. Not because it’s clever. But because it’s true, and because most Americans — even ones who voted Republican — want the TSA line to move.
The shutdown will end eventually. Some version of the two-track deal will probably get done. ICE will get its money through reconciliation — assuming they can thread the procedural needle — and most of DHS will reopen. But the political damage is already baked in. Trump himself shifted his position within a single day, going from demanding the SAVE America Act be attached to any deal on Monday morning, to endorsing a compromise by Monday evening. That kind of public whiplash doesn’t project strength. It projects chaos.
And chaos, as every voter knows, belongs to whoever is running the show.
Right now, that’s not the Democrats.
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