“Shutdowns are terrible,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) admitted several times in an October television interview.
Clark spoke of “families that are going to suffer.” She insisted that her party, which at least technically caused the shutdown by refusing to end a filibuster in the Senate, “take[s] that responsibility very seriously.” At the same time, she told Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pergram that a federal government partial shutdown is “one of the few leverage times we have,” as a party without majorities in either house of Congress. “It is an inflection point in this budget process.”
Her party wants to, well, inflict some pain on Republicans unless they meet Democratic demands. GOP members of Congress must agree to an extension of expanded Obamacare subsidies, first passed in 2021, as a condition of reopening the government.
Republicans weren’t having it, but most pouncing would have been pointless. Clark is in an utterly safe seat in the Boston suburbs. She ran unopposed in the 2024 election, receiving 98.2% of the vote. In the previous election in 2022, with an actual opponent, she scored 74% of all votes cast. So, the GOP campaign apparatus targeted lower-hanging fruit instead.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), 79, barely squeaked out a victory in the last election, scoring 48.3% to Republican opponent Derek Merrin’s 47.6%. She has announced a reelection bid for 2026. Thus, the National Republican Congressional Committee issued a statement from spokesman Zach Bannon charging, “Out of touch Democrat Marcy Kaptur engineered a shutdown, then admitted that Ohioans’ pain is ‘leverage.’”
“Marcy Kaptur’s Democrat Boss Said the Quiet Part Out Loud,” charged the somewhat more accurate headline for that news release.
Be silent, deplorables
“Saying the quiet part out loud” has become a charge with cross-partisan appeal. It was popularized by critics of President Donald Trump during his first term in office. It functioned similarly in Democratic Party rhetoric to defeated Trump opponent Hillary Clinton’s criticism of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” In other words, at the time, it was a tool of conformity through shame.
The statement was often used to allege racism. At a 2019 Trump rally in North Carolina, some members of the audience chanted in favor of deporting Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) back to her native country of Somalia. Though Trump quieted them down after several seconds, Omar’s fellow progressive “Squad” member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) charged in a speech that this was not nearly enough.
“Once you start telling American citizens to, ‘Go back to your own countries,’ this tells you that this president’s policies are not about immigration, it’s about ethnicity and racism,” she said. “And his biggest mistake is that he said the quiet part loud. That was his biggest mistake because we know that he’s been thinking this the entire time.”
Talkin’ in the free world
The charge was one of the many tropes of cancel culture that held some cultural force from roughly the beginning of the first Trump campaign through his reelection. And it did contain at least a kernel of truth.
When Trump first descended the elevator at Trump Tower in New York with Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” blasting over the speakers, took the stage, made fun of his opponents for sweating “like dogs,” complained that America had “become a dumpster ground for everybody else’s problems,” and charged that when “Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he did so in a different era, when people in elective office in America simply didn’t talk like that.
To hear those words coming from someone who was running for president, and then to watch him refuse to apologize or moderate, and to secure the Republican nomination and win the presidency anyway, was a shock to the system that many Americans, and most Democrats, have never recovered from.
Democrats copy Trump
The initial response of Trump’s opponents was to double down on their previous tactics of accusation and shame. Bad motives were imputed to Trump and Trump supporters, who were regularly smeared with a broad brush as racists, fascists, misogynists, and more.
When Trump and company refused to back down to the point of a riot, and then went on to mount a historic comeback last year after losing the White House to Joe Biden in 2020, the opposition’s anger curdled into something different and arguably worse. Many Democrats have adopted a more brash and confrontational style of politics, which refuses to keep anything quiet.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) called Trump an “old white nepo baby” and regularly sprinkles her public pronouncements with f-bombs to grab attention. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) announced a “name game” on social media for the forthcoming White House ballroom. Choices included the “Big ‘N’ Tacky,” “Crony Hall,” and “Where Decency Went to Die.”
Even Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) got in on it. She created a mock Truth Social post, invoking the social media troll habits of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), which aped Trump’s all-caps style and vocabulary that began “THE LOSERS WHO HATE GOVERNOR NEWSOMS BEAUTIFUL TWEETS DON’T ‘GET IT.’ SAD!!”
DEMOCRATS TRY TO KEEP UP WITH REPUBLICANS IN NATIONAL REDISTRICTING WAR
At the same time as Democrats are aping Trump’s style rhetorically, his brand of confrontational politics appears to have rubbed off on them as well. Thus, Americans have seen the rare spectacle of the natural party of government voting to shut the government down and refusing to reopen it until members get exactly what they want.
The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right of both the president and his opponents to speak their minds and to give offense, even if that makes the process of governing harder. Voters, not the courts, ultimately decide such disputes. They will have a lot to weigh in next year’s elections.
Jeremy Lott is the author of many books, most recently The Three Feral Pigs and the Vegan Wolf.
