How Schumer's Shutdown Will Give DOGE Superpowers
A shutdown isn’t a disaster. It’s a crisis. And you know what they say about those…
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NOTE: I was going to write this essay. Scott McKay beat me to the punch, and honestly, just nailed it.
But I would just add one key point. The last time Donald Trump faced a government shutdown, he won “bigly”. That’s something no other Republican has ever been able to say. Unfortunately, he lacked the team he needed to be able to consolidate his gains afterward, plus he was still facing down the obscene, corrupt Mueller investigation.
None of that is true today. Donald Trump is riding high, and with Russ Vought and DOGE, is in position to redefine what counts as “essential” and leave the federal government utterly changed before the end of any shutdown.
John Fetterman gets it. Why doesn’t Chucky Schumer? — RDM
by Scott McKay
September 25, 2025
He’s posturing, trying to achieve a suitable temperature for a deal, and that’s his job, but House Speaker Mike Johnson’s weekend Fox appearances were a little on the suspect side this past weekend if I’m being honest.
This was Johnson arguing, on Larry Kudlow’s show, that it’ll be a Democrat-led government shutdown we’ll get if Chuck Schumer and the rest of the American Sandinistas (that’s not just a perjorative taken from thin air; it wasn’t so long ago that we all got to find out about Tim Kaine’s background, no thanks to the legacy corporate media) get their way. Before he got into the budget discussion, Johnson covered the fact that most of the Democrats in the House voted against their leadership in giving a “no” to the Charlie Kirk resolution. The discussion of the budget negotiations at about the 6:15 mark…
He noted that Congress is moving closer to achieving regular order, in which the federal budget is crafted via the passage of the 12 various appropriations bills — three of which have passed in both the House and Senate and are at the conference committee stage, the other nine have come out of House committees and are due for a vote on the floor. But with the fiscal year ending in a week (Sept. 30), they’re out of time to return the budget to regular order (which would be the first time they’d managed it in a quarter-century) without a seven-week stopgap continuing resolution.
Johnson went further in an appearance on Fox News’ Saturday Morning in America with Kayleigh McEnany to reiterate that Congressional Democrats will own the consequences if they force a government shutdown; that discussion begins the segment…
Nothing Johnson said was untrue.
Except it’s one thing to decry Chuck Schumer’s bad-faith demands for an extension of Biden/COVID-era health insurance freebies and other redistributive spending — $1.4 trillion worth over 10 years, according to the sunny estimate of the Congressional Budget Office.
And it’s another thing to call the shutdown “a disaster for the country,” when it actually isn’t.
But what rankles about this — which is not to condemn Johnson, but simply to differ with the tactics being employed here — is the position of blaming Schumer and the Democrats for a shutdown.
The proper posture for this debate is this: take it or leave it, and we don’t care which you choose.
More Democrats than not have now voted against a resolution that condemns political violence and honors a man who served as the nation’s most prolific Christian witness. And all of America was paying attention and saw that.
And with the resulting poisoning of the public well, and the citizenry roused against the threat of civil strife, which is more prevalent now than at any time in decades and clearly emanating from the Left, we enter into a potential shutdown?
When Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget has a very specific plan to use a government shutdown as leverage to enact wide-scale reforms to government efficiency along the lines of those proposed at DOGE or perhaps even more aggressively? (See Also: Saving The Country With Russ Vought)
Don’t threaten me with a good time, Chuck. That’s the posture we should be seeing out of Johnson.
Some Democrats already understand this situation. I’m still struggling with the concept that John Fetterman is the most stable-minded Democrat in the Senate, but he seems to be just that. And Fetterman was awfully clear-eyed about how a government shutdown will play for his party…
The relevant quote from that appearance on CNN…
But what people will know is that that’s going to have a profound impact on millions of Americans, and that’s the wrong kinds of chaos that our country needs right now in this time, I mean, after the Kirk assassination and a lot of the other kinds of drama.
And now, for me, as a Democrat, if you are concerned by a lot of these changes that have occurred during the Trump presidency, why would you turn over a shuttered government over to Vought and the OMB to effectively remake the government in all kinds of ways? I refuse to be a part of things to empower individuals that really want to take away union workers and eliminate more kinds of parts of the government.
And that would allow them to redefine exactly what’s essential and what is not. And, for me, I’m not sure we have the appropriate kinds of leverage. Now, to be clear, I hope, I hope they decide to restore a lot of those health care things. But, for me, I don’t think — like I said, it’s the right outcome, but it’s the wrong tactic at this time always, always to shut our government down.
Fetterman said he had no idea how many of his Senate Democrat colleagues would break the filibuster of a short-term CR. It’s impossible to predict what’ll happen.
On the other hand, we did have this situation back in March, and Schumer bailed out of the fight at the last minute.
Why would things be any different this time around?
One could argue that the Democrats are in an even worse bargaining position now, seeing as though they’ve demonstrated they’re the party of Tren de Aragua, street criminals, human traffickers, drug cartels and political assassins and they want to throw an extra $1.4 trillion onto the national debt on top of an already sizable budget deficit that everyone in the country now understands is debasing the currency and causing inflation.
As an aside, I’m not sure that we can assume most Americans understand this, but that last bit is an argument expressly for a government shutdown.
It is a morally repugnant thing for a peacetime government to run a budget deficit of any size larger than nominal. To do so crushes the wallets of ordinary people, depriving us of purchasing power and serving as a regressive tax to benefit the rich. The Left might sell their redistributive government spending as benefiting the poor, but that has always been a lie, as it’s wealthy, connected corporations and non-profits who rake off the spoils of oversized government, and it’s the governmental class — whether the NGOs, the lobbyists, the bureaucrats and the others — who ultimately make themselves into a neo-nobility on the backs of the country class through that deficit.
Mike Johnson believes this. So far in the runup to the shutdown showdown, he hasn’t said it.
I wish he would.
And then I wish he’d tell Schumer publicly, “Hey Chuck, if you want to shut the government down, you go right ahead. We’ll shut this thing down for the rest of the year if you want, or until such time as we get all those appropriations bills passed through both houses.
“We’re the people skeptical about government spending in the first place, and we’re pretty comfortable letting Russ Vought prioritize essential things which will continue during a shutdown over nonessential things which will not.
“You’re the guy scared of that. Terrified, in fact. You told the whole country this back in March. You also told the country you were afraid of a shutdown because it would cancel your side’s lawfare campaign against President Trump’s executive orders. Guess you failed at enough of that, you don’t think it’s worth preserving anymore.
“But those fears were well-founded then, and they’re well-founded now. Because Russ Vought, if you give him a chance, is going to lay off all of your friends in the bureaucracy. It’ll be much smaller and particularly unfriendly to you and yours, and those people won’t be going back to work when the shutdown ends. They might not even have an office to go back to.
“And other than your hard-core supporters, whom the rest of the country is so disgusted by that you actually ought to be frightened, even though so far all they’re doing is praying for you, nobody gives a damn about your shutdown.”
Yes, I recognize how impactful it would be if Mike Johnson said “damn” on national television. That’s why I want him to say it.
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the Left’s degenerate response to it, bad will should be repaid with bad will.
Give Schumer and his goons no quarter. Force the shutdown down his throat if he thinks he can resist the will of the American people. And if the shutdown happens, let’s make sure the nine remaining appropriations bills get sizable haircuts before they’re sent to the Senate. That deficit needs cutting anyway, so find all the Democrat pressure points and hit them with a sledgehammer.
I don’t want violence in the streets. I want aggressive conservative reform. I want the levers of power used to make permanent change that demoralizes the Democrats and drives them right out of the political mainstream. And I want it done out in the open, unapologetically and with zero accommodation to the abomination the Democrats have become.
The shutdown isn’t a disaster, Mr. Speaker. It’s a crisis. And those people on the other side taught us never to let a crisis go to waste.
Act accordingly.
— Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator, where this essay first appeared.
"Please, Mr. Schumer, doan throw me into that briar patch!" cried Brer Trump and Brer Vought.
I posted to several of my text groups that I welcome a shut down. Let Russ Vought go to town! Prioritize the MAGA agenda and defund the America hating bureaucracy. I love it. Maybe we can make some progress towards Scott Bessent’s 3% of GDP goal for the deficit while growing the real economy, not the government.