For the first time since 2019, the federal government has shut down after Congress failed to pass a funding bill before a midnight deadline. A vote called by Senate Republicans on a stopgap funding bill that was passed previously by Republicans in the House failed on Tuesday evening. That bill would have kept the government funded at current levels until Nov. 21.
Deep divisions remain between Democrats and Republicans to overcome the funding impasse. Among the concessions Democrats are demanding from Republicans are an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year, and rolling back cuts to Medicaid under the GOP tax and spending bill signed by President Trump in July. Republican Congressional leaders and President Trump have sought to blame the shutdown on Democrats. Polls conducted before the shutdown by the New York Times and NPR showed roughly a third of respondents would blame both parties for the shutdown, though more respondents put the blame on Republicans than Democrats.
Democratic Oregon U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley joins us from the nation’s capital to talk about the shutdown and the deployment of 200 Oregon National Guard members in Portland expected in the coming days.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We begin today with the federal government shutdown. It started at 9 p.m. Pacific time last night, after two different last ditch efforts to keep the government funded failed on largely party line votes. We hope to talk to Oregon Republican Congressman Cliff Bentz about this shutdown at some point soon.
Today, we bring you a conversation with Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley. We talked about an hour-and-a-half ago. I started by asking him where negotiations stood.
Jeff Merkley: Well, the Republicans have shut down the government because they want to lock in their devastation of health care for American families. And we’re saying, “Hell, no!” This is not right. This is a families lose, billionaires win agenda. We’ve seen that agenda since the president came in in January and had the billionaires standing behind him at the swearing in. And it’s just gotten worse and worse, and this set of proposals that he passed into law on what they call the Big Beautiful Bill – but we call the “Big Ugly Betrayal” – is so devastating, and people will start to feel the impact very soon.
Miller: Obviously, they say that you shut down the government because you didn’t vote to continue funding it. Those are semantic issues and there’s no way, talking to one side, we’re gonna come to an agreement on that particular language – I just put that out there. What would it take for you to vote to fund the government once again?
Merkley: We need to recognize that Republicans hold the keys to the city. They control the House, they control the Senate, they control the Oval Office. So when you have that type of control, and then you refuse to even hold conversations with the minority party, under a situation where bipartisan support is required, you’re deliberately shutting down.
And you’re shutting down because we put forward two reasonable demands. The first was that these health care provisions that will result in 15 million people losing health care and will result in increases in Oregon of about 65% of people who are buying health insurance on the exchange – and double digit increases for everyone else – will result in a lot of people not being able to afford insurance, not having insurance, less revenue coming to our hospitals and our clinics, which means they will have to cut back. And in a rural area, if the clinic goes down or the hospital goes down, it’s not just the people on insurance who lose their health care, it’s everybody who lives in that town.
So that is a very reasonable point, saying you all did this in order to fund tax breaks for billionaires. That’s wrong. We need to have families thriving, not families who are being devastated by this new bill you passed. So that’s a very reasonable demand.
And the second one is when we pass the spending bill, the president doesn’t unilaterally undo it with freezes or slow walking the funds until the fiscal year expires. So if it’s in the law, follow the law, Mr. President. Also another very reasonable request.
Miller: I should note that we have made multiple requests to have Cliff Bentz, the only Republican member of Oregon’s congressional delegation, on this show, including numerous requests in the last three days. The most recent reply from a spokesperson this morning included these lines: “I’m still working on your request. We will get back to you if we wish to move forward.”
It’s not just Republicans though who voted last night to keep the government open. Your colleague John Fetterman, a Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, did so as well. He was one of three Democrats to do so. He said this: “If you really want to change policies, win elections. More chaos is the last thing our nation needs.” What’s your response to your Democratic colleague?
Merkley: Well, I have a different perception. I have a perception that in the Senate it takes bipartisan support to pass a spending bill, which means we all carry responsibility, even if we’re not in the majority, to fight for America’s families. And the way you fight for them is, if something devastating is coming their way, you stand up and say “hell no, we’re not going to give that our support.” And so that’s where I stand.
Miller: To be clear, it seems like the Democratic plan right now is to use the potential political pain of a shutdown to force Republicans to backtrack on parts of the One Big Beautiful Bill, a vote that Democrats lost over the summer. Would you agree with that?
Merkley: Well, certainly on health care, yes. And by the way, there were a bunch of Republicans who said, “I voted for this bill, but I don’t like what we did to health care. I want to change that piece.” And just on the floor an hour ago when I was down there, there were a whole group of Republicans coming over to Democrats saying, “we really messed up on this health care stuff, we want to fix this.”
So again, the point we’re making was not unreasonable. They felt under huge pressure from Trump to pass his entire agenda, but realized what that agenda did: it didn’t just cut health care to fund tax breaks for billionaires, it also cut child nutrition. It also cut medical research. It also proceeded to run up $30 trillion in additional debt over the next 30 years. So there’s a lot of Republicans who really didn’t like elements of that bill, and we’re giving them a chance here to come with us and fix it.
And you know what they told me on the floor? They said this is not good for us politically. What we’ve done to our own families back home will hurt them. We want to make a deal. Well, great! That’s exactly why we were asking to meet with Republicans for the last two months when the president and the majority leader and the Speaker all basically stiff-armed us. And now those negotiations will take place.
But again, two reasonable demands. Some form on both of those needs to be in the bill.
Miller: For the Democratic plan to work, this bet in a sense, the shutdown would have to end up putting more pressure on Republicans than on Democrats. Somebody is going to have to give up something. Why do you think that it’s going to lead to more pressure on Republicans?
Merkley: Because what they passed is hurting their own constituents enormously, and they know it. And that’s what I meant by them coming across the floor just an hour ago, and by those who actually said after the vote on the “Big Ugly Betrayal” of a bill that they regretted that portion of it.
But let me tell you about another piece of this. The second piece is the growing authoritarian takeover of our country. Our very democracy is under a threat we haven’t seen since the Civil War. We’ve seen it in the attack on the press, the attack on free speech, the attack on assembly, the attack on major institutions, be they law firms or universities, the militarization or weaponization of the Department of Justice going after what Trump calls “political enemies,” but by that he means people who have disagreed with him in the past or pursued a role in our justice system pursuing equal justice under under law. All of these things are exceptional.
And then on top of that we see the president trying to steal the power of the purse, which under the Constitution is assigned to Congress. Congress prepares a law, they pass it, the president signs it, a president’s supposed to implement it, which he hasn’t been doing. So that is a violation of the fundamental separation and key to an authoritarian power. The president proceeds to be able to exercise all of those influences I just described and then plan to send the military to cities across America as a so-called “training ground” for them. Training for what? The deployment of the military, internal to the United States, is a major red line that protects us against an authoritarian force.
Miller: I want to come back to that in a second, but I just want to stick with the shutdown itself. Traditionally, it has been Democrats who have said versions of “a robust federal government can work for the public good,” and that’s sort of been, in various ways, a core Democratic Party principle. It’s Ronald Reagan who said famously that some of the scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Broadly, it’s those different philosophies of a very limited government or a more robust one … the general thinking is that a government shutdown, the Democrats have more to lose in one than Republicans. Do you think that that basic conception has changed, is different now?
Merkley: Well, often [when] we think about a shutdown, we think, “well, what will happen in a shutdown?” The president might use the flexibility under what is essential and not essential in order to exercise undue influence. But actually, what this president has been doing is exercising that power through the funding freezes, the grant cancellations, the impoundments, when we’re not in a shutdown. The concerns often about what happens in a shutdown, those things are happening without a shutdown.
So we’re seeing, basically, in between the March 15 vote … And you remember what Shakespeare said, “beware the Ides of March,” the middle of March. In that case, folks said we’re not ready to lay out as clear an argument as we need. And a group of my colleagues voted to keep the government open …
Miller: Led by the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Merkley: It’s correct. But between then and now, look how many attacks there have been on our democracy, and look how many grants have been canceled that were wired into law, and look how many programs that are authorized and funded by law have simply been shut down through funding freezes or impoundments. So we’ve had another six months of a massive assault on the normal operating of our government, and that’s without a shutdown.
At some point, you have to take a stand and you have to say what’s happening is unacceptable. In the studies of how democracies become strongman or authoritarian states, there are three elements: a rubber stamp Congress, a court system that gives more power to the executive and an authoritarian personality at the head of the executive branch. We have all three. And they also lay out that the best two ways to stop a permanent or enduring authoritarian state is to have a fight when the changes first happen, in that first year. Because otherwise, folks go “well, maybe this is just an acceptable direction to go. Maybe it’s not such a violation of the norms or the Constitution.” You have to have a fight that accentuates that this is not normal, that this is not right, that this is unconstitutional.
And the second is the next election. And why the next election? Because this authoritarian structure will seek to modify how elections are conducted, which will have a huge impact on hardwiring authoritarian power in the future. And we see that as the president’s pursuing a unified database for registration, so it can more easily be purged. We see it through his operation to try to gerrymander Texas and other states in order to increase, inappropriately, balance of power in the House of Representatives. We see it with this attack on vote-by-mail, because it’s much easier to manipulate an election on Election Day than it is vote-by-mail or early voting.
So I’m ringing the alarm bells and saying we are in a perilous moment, not seen since the Civil War, where our government by and for the people is under assault, and we better not just sit back and say we’ll wait for a better moment to fight. Because if we do that, this authoritarian structures will get wired into our system. It will be much more difficult to recover.
Miller: How long are you thinking right now that the shutdown will go?
Merkley: Well, it’s a Republican shutdown, so the Republicans will decide how long it goes. Two reasonable items have been put forward and if they want to continue to destroy health care for ordinary Americans, well then it could be a while. We had under Trump 1, I think it was a 31-day shutdown, and President Trump in his first term did bear the political weight of that shutdown because he was at the heart of the obstinance that made it happen. And that’s certainly true here.
If you think back to 2013, when Obama was in office, Trump, not then president, said if there’s a shutdown, it’s the fault of the president. The president has to bring people together and work out a deal. Well, what did Trump do when he was in office? He said it’s my way or the highway, I’m not even talking to the Democrats. So by his own logic, Republicans bear the responsibility for what’s happening now. They have attacked Americans’ health care. They are making everything about our health care system more expensive, more difficult, lower funding for our clinics, for our hospitals, longer wait times and higher costs of drugs. They’re making everything that we don’t like worse and that’s the wrong way to go.
Miller: Senator Merkley, what are you expecting when federal troops arrive in Portland, perhaps as early as next week?
Merkley: Well, in this case, they’re federalized Oregon National Guard members. They’re going to go through training. My hope is that their training is you never ever touch a peaceful protester. We saw on reports from The Oregonian that the Federal Protective Services that are patrolling the ICE building were assaulting peaceful protesters. I talked with the regional ICE director, met with her, and said, “You’ve got to make sure this ends. You’ve got The Oregonian reporting its own staff have witnessed your folks attacking peaceful protesters. This is absolutely unacceptable.” And she said, “Well, it’s not us, it’s Federal Protective Service.” But I said, “They’re guarding your building. You have a responsibility to go and make sure that they start operating in the way that they’re supposed to, which is protect the building, not assault peaceful protesters.” I saw three women out there holding signs with flowers on them. No, you don’t attack them. You don’t do what happened in 2020 and go out there with batons and beat a Navy veteran into the ground and break his bones. This is wrong.
I have confidence that the Oregon National Guard members, this is their own state, will understand that line. But I hope their training really accentuates that, because if they’re told “go out there and get tough and rough up those protesters,” which has been Trump’s attitude, they are deliberately seeking to create violence. And the violence is Trump’s ticket to expanding his authoritarian powers. So I’m sending the message: don’t take the bait, Portland. Protest, but protest away from the federal officers. Don’t help President Trump achieve his goal of violence and riots.
Miller: Jeff Merkley, thanks very much.
Merkley: Thank you.
Miller: Jeff Merkley is Oregon’s junior Democratic U.S. Senator. We talked about two hours ago.
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