Why Democrats Should Shut Down the Government

Guest Submission from Josh Gohlke

We have a guest submission today from my friend and former Los Angeles Times editor, Josh Gohlke.

I resigned from the Los Angeles Times in December of 2024. I left because I didn’t want to be part of a newsroom that was being forced into appeasing Donald Trump under the guise of “balance.” At the time, I wrote that this was no moment for neutrality, but a time for honest people to stand up for what’s right.

In the time since, Trump’s bullying of the media has gone from corrosive to openly tyrannical. Just this past week, Jimmy Kimmel was yanked off the air in a brazen act of political censorship—an unmistakable warning shot to every journalist, comedian, and artist who might dare to mock or criticize the President.

But in a heartening reversal and sign of the power of popular opposition, Disney, which owns ABC, has since decided to put Kimmel back on the air, though it’s not immediately clear whether ABC affiliates will carry the show. Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns dozens of ABC affiliate stations, has already announced it won’t air it beginning Tuesday night, replacing the time slot with “news programming.”

Executives, editors, and creators are being pushed out or muzzled, not for lack of talent but for refusing to bend the knee. The Times is but one high-profile example in the broader collapse across our media institutions.

That brings me back to Josh Gohlke. Josh, my longtime editor at the Times, eventually made the same painful decision I did: he walked away rather than lend legitimacy to a paper bowdlerized into submission. It was a far bigger sacrifice for him—his full-time livelihood, his family’s security. He chose to stand up.

In the time since, Josh has been writing his Substack, and it’s been terrific. With his permission, I’m reprinting his essay, Why Democrats Should Shut Down the Government, below. If you value independent voices in a time of creeping censorship, I urge you to subscribe to his Substack, Laughing Leads to Crying. It’s thoughtful and sharp—and it deserves your support.

Talk to you later.

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Over the last 30 years, Republicans have forced the U.S. government to shut down for a total of about two and a half months. What urgent demands were they making on pain of federal paralysis? They wanted to reduce government spending, raise Medicare premiums, impede a health care law passed years earlier or, in the case of the longest such shutdown in history, squander billions of dollars putting up fences along the southern border (presumably just in case Mexico didn’t pay for it).

Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash

These obviously aren’t paragons of responsible policymaking who should be emulated. But this history does provide an illuminating context for those gnashing their teeth over whether they should dare toss a tiny wrench into the fascist juggernaut our federal government has become. As with the debate over retaliatory gerrymandering in California and other Democratic-run states, the opposition is indulging in extended hand-wringing over a tactic that the regime and its allies have already deployed regularly, readily and recklessly.

Refusing to fund this government would not fit that description. Democrats in Congress have shown that they are far more hesitant than Republicans to shirk their responsibility to do the job they were elected to do, and rightly so in most cases. They have largely avoided such dead-endism not only over the years but as recently as a few months ago, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led the faction that helped pay for federal operations despite their increasingly glaring faults. Schumer had his reasons, including that the second Trump administration had just dispatched Elon Musk on an apparently drug-fueled rampage through federal agencies and payrolls, which a shutdown may have facilitated.

That being said, the decision has aged about as well as a McDonald’s-fed, exercise-eschewing demagogue. To begin with, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have since rescinded previously appropriated funds, raising difficult questions about, you know, appropriating them in the first place. Worse, the money they are spending is increasingly enabling armed occupation of cities deemed insufficiently aligned with the president’s post-democratic project.

Moreover, a growing militia of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and federalized National Guard troops is just the foremost of many manifestations of a regime that doesn’t deserve to be funded. Trump and company are using the government to enrich themselves, threaten and alienate our allies, investigate and punish their enemies, weaken educational and media institutions, and undermine public health and scientific research.

Facing such an admittedly confounding list of what’s wrong, some Democrats are all too typically coalescing around what they deem the most politic possible cause: health care. That likely means demanding that Republicans extend expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies and perhaps restore Medicaid funding, which the majority slashed to partially offset tax breaks for the rich. If Democrats are going to risk a shutdown, the thinking goes, they should opt for the most poll-tested rationale, one that directly affects many Americans and generally favors the party’s long-held positions.

The trouble is that for all its import and righteousness as a policy goal, health care is an age-old partisan battleground in this country. Fighting for more medical coverage unfortunately smacks of typical Democratic politics and normal Washington debates. Democrats closing the government to defend Obamacare won’t seem categorically different from Republicans who did so to attack it a decade ago.

To justify the extraordinary (at least for them) tactic of strangling the government by its purse strings, they should take aim at that government’s most egregious excesses. They should demand that the president take the National Guard off American streets and ICE storm troopers out of American workplaces. They should insist that federal agents show their faces and that state and local officials retain their power over their jurisdictions. They should call for a return to standard law enforcement and national defense and a clear separation between the two. They should fight a hijacking of federal forces that foreshadows an assault on elections and democracy.

Yes, that would require taking on the administration’s disingenuous claims that it’s merely reining in illegal immigration and crime. Democrats may fear being caught on the wrong side of such popular ostensible purposes, but fear is the problem. Consider that every opposition figure who has gained any traction lately — Gavin Newsom, Cory Booker, Zohran Mamdani — has done so by demonstrating a degree of fearlessness.

Would picking such a fight deter Trump and his allies from their jackbooted crackdown on vulnerable immigrants and political opponents? Of course not. Unlike a surprising number of technological glitches, America can’t be fixed by turning it off and on again.

A government shutdown could, however, draw precious attention to the regime’s worst outrages and persuade more Americans that they have a viable alternative. It could even help Democrats gain enough power to do more than yell and scream about it. But yelling and screaming is the least they can do.