Life, Liberty, Property #121: Government Shutdowns and Political Polarization
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IN THIS ISSUE:
Government Shutdowns and Political Polarization
Video of the Week: CNN Declares Men Are a “Disease” — Yes, Really – In The Tank #515
The New Normal for Employment Growth
Power to Appoint, Power to Remove
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Government Shutdowns and Political Polarization
The ongoing government shutdown, now in day 20, lays bare the increasingly acute political polarization of the United States.
In general, a government shutdown lasts as long as at least one political party thinks it gains an advantage by it: winning the blame game and getting the public angry at one’s opponents, which each party hopes will result in a boost in the next election. Agreement to end a shutdown requires at least a few members of the party that opposes a compromise to break ranks. That calculation relies on the opinions of independents, or swing voters.
That happened this past spring, averting a shutdown altogether, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led several Democrats in approving a stopgap bill to fund the government in March.
That famously led to strident attacks on Schumer from his fellow Democrats, including threats to jettison him through a primary challenge in his next bid for reelection. That prospect has removed swing voters from Schumer’s calculations. The firestorm from Schumer’s left resulted in the current standoff, with Schumer championing the Democrats’ opposition to funding the government for even seven weeks unless the Republicans reverse the Democrats’ own scheduled phaseout of enhanced subsidies for Obamacare coverage, which would take place at the end of this year.
The House of Representatives, with a microscopic GOP majority, passed a funding extension without reversing the subsidy phaseout. With the standoff in the Senate, Republican leaders have offered to take a separate vote on extension of the subsidies, which the Democrats have refused, insisting that it be included in the funding bill itself.
Republicans countered by saying the Democrats are intent on spending taxpayer money on health care for people in the country illegally. Democrats have denied that, but the accusation seems to have turned the issue toward the Republicans’ advantage. Public opinion on the matter has changed significantly since the beginning of the shutdown, with people now blaming both parties equally. ABC News reported on Thursday,
With Democrats and Republicans continuing to point fingers at each other as the federal government shutdown drags on into its third week, polling has shown over the past few weeks that Americans have moved toward blaming Republicans, Democrats, and President Donald Trump almost equally, after being skewering a bit more towards blaming Republicans or Democrats earlier.
A poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (AP-NORC) published on Thursday and taken in mid-October, for instance, found that 58% of U.S. adults, think Trump has “a great deal/quite a bit” of responsibility for the shutdown, while a similar 58% say Republicans in Congress do and 54% say Democrats in Congress do. …
An earlier Washington Post poll taken on Oct. 1, at the start of the shutdown, found that more Americans blamed congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump (47% of Americans) than Democrats (30% of Americans)—though around 1 in 5 said then that they were not sure who was to blame.
The Democrats have lost an amazing amount of ground in public opinion of their demand for an Obamacare enhanced subsidy extension, fully 35 percentage points:
When the AP-NORC poll asked Americans if they support or oppose “extending the federal tax credits for individuals who purchase health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace,” 43% said they favor that but 42% said they neither favor or oppose.
But in a poll from KFF taken right before the federal government shutdown began, 78% of Americans said they want the ACA marketplace tax credits extended—including 59% of Republicans.
Many press outlets, especially AP, are trying to spin the poll results as showing Americans “believe Republicans and Democrats share the blame for failing to find a funding solution,” as Politico put it. The numbers, however, indicate that the Democrats have been losing the argument.
The Washington Post accurately characterizes the conflict as emerging from the nation’s ongoing political polarization, the increasingly radical divergence between the two parties’ visions of government, “the two parties’ rage at each other and their battle over who will run Washington for the next three years,” WaPo analyst Naftali Bendavid writes:
Most immediately, the shutdown is over Democratic demands that Congress extend health care subsidies and the Republican response that Congress first must pass a stopgap spending measure. But looming behind those questions are two groups of activists fighting a pitched battle to determine the country’s broader path.
“The MAGA movement dominates the Republican Party totally. The progressives don’t dominate the Democratic Party totally, but they are working on it,” [former U.S. Rep. Vin] Weber said. “There was a path to compromise in the past. Today that is missing in the psyche of the people on both sides of the debate.” …
Democratic leaders were determined to block the Republicans’ next spending bill even before they had settled on specific demands. President Donald Trump has responded by freezing projects and firing workers, seeking to pressure Democrats in ways unrelated to the shutdown. (A judge Wednesday temporarily blocked those layoffs.)
The increasing divergence between the two parties has reduced the number of political independents and thus diminished their power to resolve these conflicts, Bendavid argues:
Previous closures ended when swing voters made it clear whom they blamed for the dispute, prompting one party to cave for fear of the political consequences. Today, the number of such swing voters has shrunk, while the parties’ hardcore bases are more energized than ever, ready to revolt against any potential deal as an unacceptable capitulation.
Bendavid quotes Republican strategist Matt Gorman as arguing the Democrats’ hard line in the Senate is winning support from the far left:
“This is the first time in a year the far-left base hasn’t been screaming at Democrats,” Gorman said. “It’s like the old saying, ‘The best part of an elephant stepping on your foot is the feeling when the elephant stops stepping on your foot.’ Why would the Democrats stop? Their base, for once, isn’t foaming at the mouth, screaming obscenities towards them.”
Meanwhile, Republicans are enjoying broad approval from their base, Bendavid writes:
“The bases of both parties are operating on nuclear energy right now,” said former congressman Steve Israel (D-New York). “That is where most of the activism and motivation is.”
The shutdown is shaping up as a referendum on which vision of the federal government will prevail—for the time being, at least.
The government is still shut down, and Democrats are warning that the expiration of Obamacare subsidies at the end of this year will make healthcare unaffordable for millions. But that’s not true. While the system certainly needs reform, the real problem lies deeper than temporary subsidies. The Heartland crew will break down what needs to change to make healthcare work for everyone.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has floated the idea that the United States may need to “decouple” from China if they continue to play unfairly in global markets. What would that mean for essential materials and the broader economy—and has America waited too long to act?
And on this week’s UNHINGED segment, CNN revives an old feminist slogan that claims men who find women attractive are a societal problem. The panel will discuss why this narrative keeps failing and what it says about modern media culture.
The New Normal for Employment Growth
With recent reports showing U.S. employment growth has slowed, it is important for the Federal Reserve (Fed) governors, policymakers, and the public to understand “whether this signals a healthy rebalancing or the start of a concerning slowdown” of the economy, writes principal research economist Anton Cheremukhin for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
“Recent employment reports show U.S. payroll employment growth has cooled from its torrid pace in previous years, raising the question of whether this signals a healthy rebalancing or the start of a concerning slowdown,” Cheremukhin writes.
If the labor market is contracting because of demographic changes, the Fed need not intervene to prop up employment to satisfy the “maximize employment” side of its dual mandate from Congress. If it is contracting because of a slowdown in employer demand, the Fed will want to remedy that by loosening the money supply.
Cheremukhin’s analysis, which is a perceptive interpretation of the data, will arrive as a great relief to Fed Open Market Committee members who want the slowest possible pace of interest rate reductions or none at all:
A new, high-frequency estimate of break-even employment shows a dramatic reversal in immigration flows, combined with cyclical shifts in labor force participation, has caused the monthly break-even requirement to collapse from a peak of approximately 250,000 in 2023 to about 30,000 in mid-2025.
This recalibration suggests that today’s more modest payroll gains don’t signal weakness but are consistent with a balanced labor market. Furthermore, the new measure highlights the growing importance of using timely, comprehensive data to track an economy reshaped by volatile demographic forces.
Cheremukhin found that the break-even number has fallen dramatically in the past two years:
The series rose from less than 100,000 new jobs to keep employment in balance in late 2020 to a peak of roughly 250,000 in mid-2023. Since then, it has collapsed, falling to the current estimate of approximately 30,000.
The main reason for this large decrease is something that should be obvious: “The most significant driver of recent volatility in the labor force has been immigration,” Cheremukhin writes. There was “an estimated net outflow (including self-deportation) of approximately 300,000 individuals during 2025,” Cheremukhin notes.
Federal agencies use estimates and “periodic survey data” to determine immigration flows, which results in a “considerable lag” in the numbers reported, meaning they are regularly inaccurate, Cheremukhin writes: “In a period of rapid demographic shifts, these lags can lead to a misreading of the economy in real time.”
In what Cheremukhin describes as “an economy shaped by demographic volatility,” payrolls and growth of gross domestic product “have become less reliable indicators of economic slack or overheating.” The unemployment rate is a better signal of economic health because it “has been remarkably insensitive to these demographic shocks,” Cheremukhin writes.
What these numbers tell us, Cheremukhin concludes, is that certain fundamentals of the U.S. economy have changed dramatically:
The goalposts have moved. A break-even rate of around 30,000 appears to be the new reality for the U.S. labor market. This means modest payroll gains, which might have seemed alarming in 2023, are now indicative of a stable and balanced market.
Cheremukhin’s observations have important implications for the Fed and for President Trump.
The Fed has been exceedingly reluctant to reopen the money spigot since Donald Trump returned to office in late January, though the central bank did so last year during the final months of President Biden’s term in office (in what a cynic might see as a failed attempt to get Vice President Kamala Harris across the finish line in her campaign for president). The lower employment-expansion target could give the Fed confidence that interest rates are not holding down economic growth.
Meanwhile, it seems likely that the new employment-growth numbers will not sound terrific to the president and his team, nor to the public, when they are announced in the coming months. Business people and members of the public attuned to economic conditions will find the numbers dispiriting if they are not aware of this context, especially if the unemployment rate does not decrease.
The Trump administration would be wise to start publicizing this “new normal” right away and make sure to characterize anything above the new break-even number accordingly. When the employment and unemployment numbers arrive in coming months, the administration should characterize them in accordance with reality, not the faulty expectations of models that fail to account properly for the immigration reversal of 2025.
‘The CSDDD is the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union.’
Power to Appoint, Power to Remove
President Donald Trump’s struggles with the courts over his attempts to shrink the federal bureaucracy have raised an interesting and controversial constitutional issue: a president’s power to remove executive department officials.
The question for those who support formalism and original intent in analyzing constitutionality is what a grant of “the power to oversee the execution of the laws” means, writes University of Minnesota law professor Ilan Wurman at Law & Liberty:
My view is that “the executive power” is a substantive grant of power, but of only one: the power to oversee the execution of the laws. But that power, I argue, includes removal—not because removal was a freestanding executive prerogative, but rather because it was part and parcel of the power to oversee the execution of the laws.
The Vesting Clause comprises the first words of Article II of the Constitution, the article which describes the duties, authority, and selection of the president: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” There are two major theories of what that means, note law professors Saikrishna B. Prakash and Christopher H. Schroeder in an article for the National Constitution Center:
Some believe that the Article II Vesting Clause gives the President nearly complete control over the actions of the executive branch and over the officials who undertake those actions. The core argument is that the Constitution vests all of the executive power in the President and that all subordinate officials necessarily derive their power to act from the President’s power. To ensure that these officials faithfully execute the President’s power, the President has the power to supervise and control each of them without the interference of Congress. This theory is entitled the “Unitary Executive.” But this label is a bit misleading, for we would do well to remember that the idea that the Constitution establishes a unitary executive in the sense identified above is universally shared.
Others believe that Article II does not establish a completely hierarchical executive under the President’s control. Many further insist on the importance of the Necessary and Proper Clause, which vests in Congress the power “[t]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution … all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Departments or Officer thereof.” Art. I, § 8, cl.18. The basic argument is that this Clause gives Congress considerable authority to structure the bureaucracy as it sees fit. Even so, Congress must not impede the President’s ability to discharge his constitutional duties or interfere with powers that rest conclusively and exclusively with the President, such as the pardon power.
The grant of powers to the president is more expansive than the powers granted to Congress, the U.S. Congress’s Constitution Annotated website notes:
Whereas the Article I Legislative Vesting Clause provides that All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress,7 thereby distinguishing the powers granted by states from those they retained, the Article II Executive Vesting Clause does not limit the executive Power in any way.8 Consequently, since the earliest days of the Republic, the parameters of the executive power and, in particular, what implicit or residual powers such executive power encompasses have been the subject of debate.
While arguing that the Constitution does mean to limit the president’s powers, and that “nothing about Article II supports the strong version of the so-called unitary executive thesis,” Wurman contends that “the president always has the right to remove [Executive Department officials], for any reason, if he thinks those officers have not exercised their discretion well. This view would also make sense of the Opinions Clause” (“he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices”), Wurman notes.
This authority flows from the president’s responsibility for seeing to the execution of laws passed by Congress, Wurman observes:
Whatever the Vesting Clause might otherwise grant the president—that is, regardless of whether the president can direct officers or has some other residuum of power—the executive power is, at a minimum, the power to oversee the execution of the laws by others. Because the king, a governor, or the president could not possibly execute the laws alone, the executive power was understood to include the power to appoint officers to assist.
The Constitution assumes a removal power on the part of the chief executive, as that was the common understanding at the time of its adoption, Wurman says:
The more controversial question is the connection between appointment and removal. Giles Jacob’s law dictionary—the most prominent in America at the Founding—stated plainly that the king “names, creates, makes and removes the great officers of the government.” As Shugerman has written, however, it is “rare to find much discussion of removal power on the Founders’ bookshelf.” But there is an explanation for such silence: the power to remove was incident to the power to appoint. Thus, the appointment power included removal by default because an officer could be removed by the very act of appointing someone new.
That is exactly what President Trump tried to do in dismissing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook in August of this year, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit blocked in September.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton all agreed that appointment power authorizes removal, despite their widely varying views on the overall role of the federal government, Wurman writes:
In 1780, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private note: “The power of appointing and removing executive officers inherent in Executive. Executive inadequate to every thing. Appoint deputies. … He who appoints may remove.” On this point, Alexander Hamilton agreed. When he appointed Tench Coxe as the assistant secretary of the Treasury pursuant to the act establishing the Treasury Department, he noted in the commission that he could remove Coxe even though the statute was silent. …
Even James Madison agreed that in general “the power to annul an appointment is, in the nature of things, incidental to the power which makes the appointment.” He argued that if all the Constitution said on this score was that the president and Senate shall appoint, then he would agree that the president and Senate together must remove. Because the Constitution included both the Executive Vesting Clause and the Take Care Clause, however, he thought otherwise. The power to remove may follow from the power to appoint, but the power to appoint is—as noted previously—ultimately an incident of executive power. “If any thing in its nature is executive,” Madison stated, “it must be that power which is employed in superintending and seeing that the laws are faithfully executed.”
Madison emphasized the crucial difference between the powers granted to Congress and to the president, as mentioned in the Constitution Annotated passage quoted above. Wurman writes:
Thus, Madison argued, both appointment and removal were ultimately incidents of the executive power. The Constitution then derogates from that principle with respect to appointments, but not for removals. The “association of the Senate with the President in exercising” the appointment function, Madison argued, “is an exception to this general rule” that the executive power is vested in the president, which exception does not apply to removal.
The Take Care Clause further supports this proposition, Madison argued, because it implied that the president has the power “necessary to accomplish” the duty of faithful execution.That is, giving the Senate a check on removal effectively transfers the take care duty from the president to the Senate.
The Constitution grants the Take Care duty exclusively to the president, Madison and Wurman note. That means the Senate does not have the authority to stop the president from removing officers of the government. Wurman writes,
It is true that Congress establishes offices, and doing so furthers the president’s ability to oversee faithful execution. Even tenure rules, qualifications for office, bipartisanship requirements, and the like can help the president carry law into execution. But Congress can no more restrict the president’s power to remove—once it is acknowledged he has that power—than it can restrict his power to pardon. …
Presidents Washington, Jefferson, and even Taft—who subsequently authored the Myers v. United Statesopinion—thought Congress could insulate the individual decisions of an officer. But, Taft wrote, the president “may consider the decision after its rendition as a reason for removing the officer, on the ground that the discretion regularly entrusted to that officer by statute has not been on the whole intelligently or wisely exercised.”
It also seems obvious that the courts are likewise prohibited from interfering in the president’s execution of this duty, which the Supreme Court acknowledged in the early years of the republic, as Wurman notes. Later decisions by courts to limit the president’s authority in appointments and removals unjustifiably disregard this constitutional principle and should be overturned as soon as possible, in my view.
Although it can be difficult to divorce one’s thoughts about the legitimacy of executive actions or judicial decisions from the likely consequences of particular instances and the politics behind them, it is essential that these determinations be based on principle. Politics is power, not necessarily justice. Principle, history, and logic affirm Jefferson’s conclusion about the presidential powers of appointment and removal of government officers: “He who appoints may remove.”
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