Checkpoint March 15, 2025
The firehosing and resilience targeting continue. Though not always strictly disinformation, the barrage of sometimes contradictory news and announcements about changes to government services and regulations that people rely on has comparable effects. If you haven’t read disinformation researcher Brooke Binkowski’s series on How to Fight Disinformation do yourself a favor and set aside some time to read it. It was written between 2020 and 2022 and its focus is primarily climate-change related, but many of the players and certainly the same techniques make an appearance, and the parallels to the current situation are extensive.
One reason I mention firehosing and resilience targeting is that it is a challenge to choose a topic to focus on in the current information environment. This week the events that probably received the most media attention (news, social, etc.) were the machinations in Congress surrounding the budget.
On Tuesday, March 11, the House passed a stopgap funding bill almost completely along party lines. The bill increased defense spending, funding for veterans health care, and funding for Immigration Customs Enforcement, while reducing non-defense spending relative to 2024 levels through September. It passed with all Republican members of the House except Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky voting for it, and all Democratic members except Rep. Jared Golden of Maine voting against it. The bill’s prospects in the Senate were uncertain, however, where 60 votes can be required to bring a resolution to a vote, and Republicans currently hold only 53 seats. Hence, even if all Republican senators lined up to support the funding bill, votes from at least 7 Democratic senators would likely be needed to bring the measure to a vote.
As you’re undoubtedly aware if you’re plugged into political media and/or social media at all, the prospect of the budget bill in the Senate exposed divisions in the Democratic party – in Washington and beyond. Democrats in the House, under the leadership of Reps.Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark, and Pete Aguilar had managed to hang together in opposition to what they described as inflicting “further pain throughout this fiscal year.”
In statement on March 8, Sen. Patty Murray, the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, described the bill as a “slush fund continuing resolution that would give Donald Trump and Elon Musk more power over federal spending." In what seemed to reflect the view of Democratic Senate leadership at the time, she advocated passing a “continuing resolution” covering a shorter timeframe than the House bill, allowing work to continue on new appropriation legislation. On March 12 NBC News reported Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stating from the Senate floor that Democrats would not support the House funding bill, and advocating the shorter term resolution as Murray had described.
Senators acknowledged, however, that, in the words of Sen. Raphael Warnock, “both outcomes are bad.” If the House bill passes, he said on Wednesday, “it will hurt a lot of ordinary people on the ground. If the government shuts down, that will hurt a lot of ordinary people on the ground, and so that is the dilemma in which we found ourselves.”
Then, in an NY Times op-ed piece published Thursday, March 13, Schumer seemed to many observers to reverse his position. Acknowledging that Republicans had rejected the Democrats proposed one-month funding bill, which would have allowed more time for the appropriations committee to work out details, Schumer highlighted the effect of a shutdown on “the most vulnerable Americans, those who rely on federal programs to feed their families, get medical care and stay financially afloat.” “Communities that depend on government services to function will suffer,” he wrote. Describing the Republican funding bill as “a terrible option,” Schumer went on to assert that “As bad as passing the continuing resolution would be … a government shutdown is far worse.” A shutdown would give Trump and Musk, “permission to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate” than they could without it, and “the Trump administration would have wide-ranging authority to deem whole agencies, programs and personnel nonessential, furloughing staff members with no promise they would ever be rehired.”
Noting that Musk reportedly advocated a shutdown, Schumer went on to suggest that it would allow Republicans to “cherry-pick” which parts of the government to reopen. “Finally,” Schumer wrote, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda.”
During the day Thursday some senators announced to media and/or constituents that they opposed the House’s continuing resolution (CR) and would vote to prevent cloture – the parliamentary procedural maneuver to allow the bill to proceed to a vote. But the Democratic senators remained divided, and at an afternoon meeting Senator Gillibrand of New York led the group advocating passage of the CR. As reported by Talking Points Memo among other outlets, it emerged that opposition to the CR had might have been “performative.” Apparently what was supposed to happen was that Democrats would vote for cloture – i.e. to close debate and allow votes on the CR to proceed – in exchange for being able to offer amendments. But the amendments would have required approval by a majority of senators, which never would have happened with Democrats in the minority. As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall described it:
Schumer lost control of the situation. Too many people figured out how Schumer’s switcheroo maneuver worked. And too many Senate Democrats didn’t have the stomach for the public opposition to what was happening. That made the initial gambit impossible. So his only choice was to drop the charade and force the matter. Late in the afternoon he went to the Senate floor, not yet 24 hours later, and announced he would vote to give the Republicans their bill.
In Marshall’s analysis the Democrats had gambled on Speaker of the House Mike Johnson not being able to shepherd the administration’s wish-list through the House, and when he succeeded were unprepared. Among other issues, Senate Democrats had not worked out a collective message as to what they were fighting for in the event a government shutdown occurred. Marshall:
When you’re weak you only think about getting hurt. It not only constrains your actions. It shapes and limits what future possibilities you are able to imagine. It makes it impossible to see or consider the ways that acting and taking risks, making foes react to you rather than constantly reacting to them can change the playing field and create new possibilities.
The future is unknowable, and disagreements are inevitable, Marshall acknowledges, in Schumer’s defense. But misleading his followers as to his intentions is likely something that will have consequences.
Similarly acknowledging that Schumer had faced two bad choices, Vanity Fair’s Eric Lutz opines that Schumer chose “the worse one.” Yes, Trump and Musk et al. would have blamed a shutdown on Democrats, had Democrats succeeded in blocking the funding bill that was crafted in the House, but supporting the bill was “effectively collaborating with a regime that has already amassed too much power and used it to dismantle much of the very government [Schumer was] seeking to keep open.”
After Schumer’s announcement that he would vote to allow the Republican spending plan to pass, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is emerging as a leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic party, told CNN “This turns the federal government into a slush fund for Donald Trump and Elon Musk.” Senator Bernie Sanders who for the past several weeks has been barnstorming the country in his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour announced in an email to supporters that Ocasio-Cortez and “other progressive members of Congress” would be joining him at events in Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. He called for rallies in all 50 states, for progressives to run for office at all levels of government, for renewed efforts in the upcoming Minnesota, Michigan, and New Hampshire campaigns for US Senate, and for community organizing and education. Sanders acknowledged to the Associated Press that this was not a role he had imagined for himself at this stage of his career. But “[y]ou gotta do what you gotta do, “ he said. “The country’s in trouble and I want to play my role.”
Even before the funding bill kerfuffle, February polling summarized at the nonpartisan Split Ticket website found widespread disapproval of Congressional Democrats among party members and Democratic-leaning independents. Split Ticket’s Lakshya Jain suggests that the Democrats’ strategy of “waiting for a blunder while letting Trump exhaust the American public” was “the only option the leaders felt they had.” The approach is “actually logical from a game-theory perspective,” he writes. “… [T]he more a majority dominates the airwaves, the more unpopular it gets, and the more the public wants to push back.” (This phenomenon, he suggests, explains the limited Republican gains amid Democratic upsets in the 2022 congressional election when the GOP was perceived as “in-power” because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade despite Democrats having had a narrow majority in the House.)
Jain points to Trump and Musk’s declining poll numbers as evidence that this strategy may be succeeding to some extent. But, he notes in bold font, “most Democratic voters are not okay with this approach.” Although Jain makes comparisons to the Republican Tea Party insurgency in 2010, he notes the Democratic voter discontent with the party is ideologically diverse. January Gallup polling found 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents wanted the Democratic party to become “more moderate,” while 29% wanted the party to become “more liberal.” (Note that the poll was conducted shortly after Trump’s inauguration, and did not characterize what the party becoming “more moderate” or “more liberal” would mean.) Nonetheless, Jain suggests, dissatisfaction with party leadership is so pervasive that he expects either the strategy will have to change or voters will change the lawmakers.
In a March 14 blog post political observer Marcy Wheeler highlighted what she considered a sensible argument against a shutdown. Because a shutdown would limit all but “essential” government operations, some observers speculated that the administration could stop legal proceedings it objected to simply by deeming the government lawyers involved “nonessential.” “Trump could simply call the lawyers engaged in these suits non-essential, stalling legal challenges in their current status, and then finding new test cases to establish a precedent while judges were stymied,” she writes. In fact, the administration has been losing some significant decisions in the courts recently as judges ordered the mass firings be reversed, required that DOGE comply with FOIA requests, and granted discovery to the plaintiffs in a suit by fourteen state attorneys general against Elon Musk in connection with firing federal agency employees or placing them on forced leave.
In Wheeler’s view the Democrats’ focus should not be the 2026 midterms, but the next three months. “… [D]emocracy will be won or lost via a nonpartisan political fight over whether enough Americans want to preserve their way of life to fight back, in a coalition that includes far more than Democrats,” she writes. The way to win this fight, she continues, is by making Trump and Musk the villains, not singling out a Democrat as hero or villain, or targeting the Democratic leadership. Democrats need to think of “people being hurt, not as Democrats, but as people opposed to fascism….”
And there’s evidence from recent polling by Civiqs that at least some Republicans are “uncertain” about aspects of Trump’s presidency. A poll published March 3 found significant percentages of Republicans unsure if the outcome of the Russia-Ukraine conflict had security implications for the US (16%), or if the president should be able to refuse to spend moneys allocated by Congress (17%).
A CBS/YouGov poll from around the same time found that 42% of Americans did not believe Trump was focused on the issue of inflation. Related – 52% of those surveyed believe Trump’s policies are causing prices to increase. An Economist/YouGov poll found Republicans holding seemingly contradictory views – supporting tariffs on Mexico and Canada while acknowledging that they will increase the cost of goods and services in the US. A significant percentage of Republicans (39%) also concede that “mostly companies and people in the US” would bear the cost of tariffs.
Writing on the Liberal Currents website, self-professed Warren Democrat Samantha Hancox-Li sketches a “roadmap for retaking power and laying the foundations for American Reconstruction.” Hancox-Li observes that while Trump’s opponents do not control Congress, the Presidency, or the Supreme Court, they do “retain levers of power” both governmental and economic “in a wide array of blue states and cities.” Moreover, although “[e]lite opinion is deeply divided,” liberals “retain a large foundation of ideational and cultural power.”
She articulates a careful message about the efficacy of protests. Protests, she argues, must not be structured merely to get attention for an explanation that will follow. She calls this “narratively vacuous.” Instead, drawing a parallel to Civil Rights-era protests Hancox-Li asserts “In an effective protest, the act itself is the message.” And she grudgingly acknowledges that the busing of immigrants to blue states organized by red state governors, while “horrific” were effective. Although they had no practical effect on immigration policy, they were what she calls “narratively effective.” “They told a story in which tough Republicans were doing what it took to stop the flood, despite the hypocrisy and fecklessness of liberals,” she writes. Trump’s opponents must find structurally similar ways to “leverage blue state power” to create protest actions that advance their narrative.
The narrative, she suggests should be “Donald Trump is ripping up the Constitution and stealing our country,” and “We are defending America from Donald Trump. And we will reconstruct the Constitutional order he has broken.” And it must be communicated via multiple channels. “We must fight in the piranha tank of social media until we are the biggest piranha,” she writes. Alternative information networks must be created, that are not “captured by bothsidesism and reactionary centrism.” She also advocates “going through” traditional media, as unpleasant as that may be. “Working refs” e.g. at the New York Times, while distasteful, is necessary, says Hancox-Li.
Again referencing Republican tactics, Hancox-Li asserts Democrats must be ready with policy proposals although they do not necessarily need to be part of the protests. She points to the role of Project 2025 – first during the Trump campaign, where it was widely regarded as a joke (or at a minimum, an extremist wish list) – and then once the administration was installed, when it served as a blueprint for action.
It will be a long struggle, Hancox-Li warns. But individual actions – contributions, interactions with MAGA, etc. – can make a difference.
The article is worth reading in its entirety and is available at the link above.