The Breakdown in Trust That Could Shut Down the Government

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In recent years, threats of government shutdowns have come with the regularity and, until now, predictability of one of those TV channels running marathons of old sitcoms. And here we are again: the ticking clock, the last-minute demands, the congealing of positions, the happy ending until next week’s episode.

Unless the Senate passes the bill passed by the House to fund government operations, the government will shut down Friday at midnight. This time, however, the situation on Capitol Hill is different and more dangerous than it has ever been.

I was a member of the House Democratic leadership as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015 and the Democratic Policy & Communications Committee from 2015 to 2016. I had a front-row seat to a series of budget brinks, debt cliffs, shutdowns and potential shutdowns, including the close call in April 2011 over Planned Parenthood funding and the one in October 2013 over the Affordable Care Act. I was there for the February 2015 shutdown threat over an executive order Mr. Obama signed on immigration, and the 2011 and 2013 debt-ceiling crises. I sat in the office of Nancy Pelosi when she was the House Democratic leader and watched her negotiate a four-dimensional chess game between a Republican Speaker, the Senate, the White House and within her own caucus during each of these crises.

Here’s how it typically went: The speaker (John Boehner or Paul Ryan) would try to find the votes to fund the government in the Republican Conference, which was and remains a caucus of caucuses. Republican defense hawks would be unhappy with low levels of Pentagon funding. Moderate Republicans — barely enough to fill a members-only elevator — would be unhappy with extremist language on issues such as women’s health. The Freedom Caucus would be unhappy about everything.

It became a math problem. A - B = C.

Ms. Pelosi would ask the speaker: A) how many votes were needed to pass a budget, B) how many votes he had; then calculate C) the number of Democrats necessary to get the bill over the hurdle.

Then she’d move beyond math to policy and politics. If she believed that a budget compromise was important to the functioning of the government, she’d engage. If Democratic votes were needed to pass a bill, the bill had to reflect Democratic priorities. At that point, she’d make the case to her caucus. That’s what happened in 2011 and 2016 and during many other near-shutdowns.

It’s no different from any other negotiation. If one party is necessary to close the deal, then the deal must include that party’s values and priorities.

But we’ve entered new territory.

Back in the day, there was a basic trust between interlocutors. Sure there was the typical fudging on the number of votes committed or available. But everyone was working toward a responsible, fairly predictable outcome.

Now we have, in President Trump, an erratic negotiator who appears to be negotiating against everyone, including himself. We saw it in the way he approached the issue of extending funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. After House Republicans and the White House appeared to settle on including long-term funding in the budget extension on Wednesday, the president tweeted opposition on Thursday. The president has said he’s for a resolution that would protect the “Dreamers” — young people brought to this country illegally when they were children, who are now covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created by President Barack Obama. But just as negotiators closed in on a deal, the president reneged by making derogatory comments about immigrants and tweeting that DACA was “probably dead.”

Last week’s vote on reauthorizing a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was a prelude to this week’s gyrations. Republican and Democratic leadership in the House and Senate worked on a compromise. The White House issued a Statement of Administration Policy officially supporting the language. Then the president almost derailed the agreement by tweeting his opposition to what he’d supported: “House votes on controversial FISA ACT today. This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?”

What’s a negotiator to do?

The fact is that governing does require deal making, and deal making requires trust between opposing leaders. Negotiations can succeed only when all parties reflect their respective views, not when one party reflects multiple views. Per day.

With a breakdown in trust, we can begin to trust something else entirely: that keeping the government open and functioning will be harder than ever.

And even if a shutdown is averted, stay tuned. You can expect the same crisis, same bluster and same script again in February.

If this is the art of the deal, then the art is a dizzying abstract form — hard to decipher and open to interpretation.

Only it’s not art. It’s the functioning of government.