Republicans appear likely to take the blame for a government shutdown

Government shutdown looks bad for Republicans

(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

published January 17, 2018

House Republicans and Democrats are polling their caucuses Wednesday on a House GOP proposal for short-term spending extension to avert a government shutdown on Friday at midnight, but with Democrats insisting that the next spending package include a solution for the 700,000 DREAMers and Republicans balking, a government shutdown is a distinct possibility.

President Trump and his fellow Republicans have already started framing a government shutdown as the fault of Democrats, "but Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, as well as veterans of past budget battles and campaigns, say that argument isn't likely to fly — not while the GOP runs the House, Senate, and White House and a deeply unpopular president sits in the Oval Office," Politico reports. Adding credence to that assumption is a new poll by Hart Research Associates of 12 battleground states, where 42 percent of respondents said they would blame Trump and congressional Republicans for a shutdown while 31 percent would blame Democrats. The same poll found that 81 percent of voters in those states support adding a DREAMer fix to the spending bill.

Still, "even though they're privately confident they have the upper hand, Democrats don't know for sure how it would play," Politico says. "The public supports DREAMers in the abstract, but would that support hold if the cost were a government shutdown?" In the last government shutdown, in 2013, Republicans took the blame — but still made gains in the next year's midterms, taking control of the Senate. "The clearest lesson from 2013 is that a government shutdown hurt Congress' popularity generally," Ed Kilgore writes at New York, with both parties taking a hit.