Why is this government shutdown so weird?

The federal government shutdown, now in its third week, is a big deal. Federal workers aren’t getting paid, and crucial public services are closed. Despite that, in media coverage and on Capitol Hill, it hasn’t exactly felt like a crisis. Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown who studies Congress, and author of the Five Points newsletter, has previously written about that dynamic; I spoke with him for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained, about what’s making this shutdown so weird and what we know about how it could end.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.

The stakes both seem really high, but also really low. The root cause of the shutdown, in some sense, is Democrats are scared that they’re going to cut a bargain and the president is just going to rescind it. Of course, that’s not a particularly sexy topic for voters, and there’s not a specific policy demand that makes sense to the audience, so instead, the Democrats have sort of gotten themselves to talk about health care.

Health care is their best issue, and so it’s natural for them to want to talk about it, but it also seems like small change, because for the first time, we have a shutdown where the demand is gettable. Previous shutdowns have been over impossible-to-achieve objectives — Obama was not going to sign a bill repealing Obamacare, and the Democrats were not going to agree to build the border wall.

Here we have a shutdown over a gettable item that doesn’t seem like super high-stakes politics. But at the same time, underneath it is this existential question over spending authority that doesn’t seem like it’s going to be resolved.

A second thing is that the partisan alignment of the shutdown doesn’t really get people super animated. Democrats are in the party of believing that government is worthwhile, and [that] most government programs, on balance, are good and helpful to people, and so I’m not sure they have their heart in shutting the government down. Likewise, Republicans who are very skeptical of the ability of government to solve problems and do things don’t really have this massive incentive to become ardent defenders of the government being open.

The combination of those two, plus the inability to drag media attention onto the shutdown, seem to be making it feel low-key. You’re getting a lot more media attention on the Middle East or Ukraine, or tariffs, or ICE and CBP activities in Portland and Chicago. The shutdown just seems like a distant third on the page.

So is the Democrats’ strategy working for them?

That depends on how you think about “working.” Do I think that the Republicans are going to agree to hold a vote on health care prior to reopening the government? No, I don’t think that. And that’s in line with past shutdowns: People taking hostages don’t get what they want until they agree to reopen the government.

The endgame here, at a policy level, is pretty simple. The Democrats will eventually agree to unconditionally open the government, while at the same time, the Republicans will give them a good-faith handshake deal that they will get their vote on extending subsidies on Obamacare.

Now, that’s only one way to look at it. A second way to look at it is public opinion about who’s being blamed. On that, I feel like the Democrats are doing better. One is the peculiar nature of what the Democrats are doing: They are trying to pretend that they didn’t cause the shutdown, which is unusual. Most people who are causing [a] shutdown are saying, “We’re doing this for a very important reason.” At any rate, there’s a lot of evidence that voters are blaming the Republicans at least as much, if not more, than Democrats.

The third way to look at it is politically, what does this do? Public opinion on shutdowns doesn’t typically lead to direct voter change of mind in elections, but it can affect short-term politics. I don’t know if the Democrats or Republicans are winning that short-term politics, but I feel like Congress is losing badly. The Trump administration has made good on its threats to sort of use the shutdown as an excuse to do all sorts of executive power grabs.

We had this new wrinkle on Wednesday with Trump just pulling money out of thin air to pay the troops. He’s been using tariff revenue to keep a food program for mothers and young children funded, at least for the time being. How sustainable is that kind of thing? Is that going to make it harder for Democrats to come to the table?

This is making everything worse, right? It’s extending the underlying argument for the shutdown, which is that the spending authority is under huge threat by the current president. At the same time, it’s patching up the pressure points that would turn public opinion, like paying the troops and things like that. I don’t know where this ends, because the Trump administration is now doing things that are, in my view, blatant violations of either the Antideficiency Act or the Constitution, and no one’s going to call them on it over troop pay or WIC funding or anything like that, because who the hell wants to bring that lawsuit?

But I think it’s always important to put this in the context of past presidents, because Trump didn’t invent executive power grabs. Throughout the 21st century, because of partisanship, presidents feel more comfortable trying these executive spending power grabs, knowing that their party is less likely to desert them. Any president who tried any of this nonsense in the ’70s or ’80s, they would have people in their own party screaming at them. But we’ve seen presidents get more brazen about this.

We’re in week three of the shutdown now. Another CR (continuing resolution) vote failed today. The Senate’s about to go out for the weekend. Do you have a sense of what the timeline looks like for ending the shutdown?

It’s a fool’s game to try and specifically predict, but we can see some pressure points coming up. One pressure point would be a second military paycheck. We’ll have the federal civilian employees missing a second paycheck. We will have, potentially, more air traffic controllers and TSA people getting annoyed by all this and deciding to do more sick-outs, which can put more pressure on the airport system. And then, the letters going out for the health care subsidies on November 1 seem like a pressure point. I would imagine that, in late October, all of these things are going to come together to create another huge pressure point.

The big thing to remember here is that, ultimately, I think the Republicans want to sign on to the extension of these subsidies, at least to protect their frontline moderate members who are desperate for this to be fixed. The weird part is that, on the totally cynical politics of this, the Democrats would probably prefer that these subsidies don’t get extended. But from a policy point of view, this is a totally gettable deal.

I have a hard time believing this is going to go much past November 1, but at this point, it’s dug in enough, and the administration is doing enough to soften the pain, that who knows.