Give Them Nothing, Speaker Johnson | The American Spectator

I’ll start with an apology to those of you who crave Five Quick Things columns in this space on Fridays. I was planning on a 5QT, but that plan didn’t survive contact with the enemy.

Because after the 12th vote in the Senate by which Democrats filibustered a continuing resolution that would have funded the federal government until such time as the 12 appropriations bills could be passed, which was expected to be around a month from now, the minority party also filibustered a bill that would have paid our troops, border patrol, air traffic control and airport security people, and other essential workers who are due to begin skipping paychecks on Nov. 1.

Asked about the continued shutdown fight and rumblings among some of the weaklings in the GOP caucus that they would be willing to support a cave-in to Democrat demands for Obamacare subsidies in return for an abandonment of the filibuster, Johnson rejected any suggestion of compromise. (RELATED: Subtext to Shutdown: Unaffordable Healthcare)

“No, we’re not going to allow Chuck Schumer to play selfish political games and hold the American people hostage,” said Johnson. “We will not negotiate with legislative terrorists.”

That was on Wednesday. On Thursday, the Democrats’ House minority leader, Hakeem “Temu Obama” Jeffries, decided to offer up some of the most ridiculous projectionism anybody’s ever seen.

Jeffries on Mike Johnson likening Democrats to terrorists: “That type of language is reckless, irresponsible, and it’s gonna get someone killed.” pic.twitter.com/ph1r2h24WM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 23, 2025

This, after his party has spent well more than a year openly normalizing political violence and actually getting people killed.

I’m so old that I remember Joe Biden calling Republicans “terrorists” during the 2021 shutdown. And Biden didn’t have the ammunition for his rhetoric that Johnson does, given that the Democrats’ minority whip was on TV this week, celebrating the suffering of those affected by the shutdown, given the “leverage” she thinks they gain from it.

I’ve said that most of the country really doesn’t care about the shutdown. So far, the Trump administration has done an objectively excellent job of insulating the American people from its effects. This isn’t like previous shutdowns during the Obama or Biden years, when the executive branch went out of its way to maximize the effects, like essentially imprisoning tourists in national parks or actively walling off open-air monuments. The American Spectator crew congregated in Washington last week for our annual gala at the National Press Club, and we didn’t see much evidence of a shutdown at all. (RELATED: ‘Old Fart’ Thinking Is Too Much in Our Way)

But next month that’s not going to be the case.

Starting on Nov. 1, for example, SNAP benefits will freeze up, and that’ll mean people on food stamps are going to feel the pinch.

In a very optimistic scenario, assuming the shutdown continues, the desperation that will quickly ensue when those EBT cards aren’t loaded with money will lead to something we’ve needed to do in this country for a long time, which is to start openly dissuading people from depending on a fiscally incontinent federal government with spiraling debt for basic sustenance. If you’re on food stamps, it’s in your best interest to get off — not just because there might be a government shutdown which interrupts the dole, but because it’s a crutch. (RELATED: How Did We Reach a $38 Trillion Debt During a ‘Shutdown’?)

And it isn’t currently designed — as it’s supposed to have been — as a temporary helping hand. It’s designed to keep you dependent.

There are other food assistance programs, particularly those run by churches and charitable groups, which lean in to help people who are food insecure stand on their own two feet.

Not to mention the fact that the SNAP program is a major contributor to the obesity epidemic, which disproportionately affects poor people in this country. For that reason alone, we need to impose major changes on it, and in some states, there will be just such reforms — like banning candy and sugary drinks and emphasizing less-poisonous food for people our tax dollars pay to sustain. (RELATED: Are Sugary Sodas Going to Disappear Under RFK Jr.’s Healthy Food Campaign?)

Go to a supermarket and get in a checkout line behind somebody with an EBT card, and you will invariably recognize the value in those changes. (RELATED: Three More States Join MAHA by Banning Candy and Soda From SNAP)

Republicans in Congress need to remember that almost nobody on the SNAP program votes for them — and the tiny trickle of people who do are far more likely to change their lifestyle behavior to reduce their government dependence than to change their voting behavior if a prolonged shutdown interrupts those benefits.

So the Democrats are inflicting pain on their own voters as a means of trying to radicalize them against the GOP.

Bold strategy, Cotton.

Ditto for federal employees, or at least the bureaucrats furloughed or RIF’ed as nonessential during the shutdown. Most are Democrats.

Except for the troops and the LEOs.

There are rumblings that President Trump is going to order the Treasury to pay the LEO and security people regardless of whether a bill or a continuing resolution provides funding for doing so. He’s already announced he’s using tariff revenue to massage the effects of the shutdown, so this could be an extension of that. There is a fair degree of hesitation one should have about this, as it’s an example of severing Congress’s purse strings and therefore altering our constitutional system of checks and balances.

But if Chuck Schumer insists on breaking that system by keeping the government closed and thus starving out our military, ICE officers, border patrol and air traffic controllers, all because he’s scared of what New York City’s massive foreign-born Communist population will do to his re-election if he doesn’t, then we’re in something akin to a soft civil war scenario. Just as Lincoln suspended habeas corpus maybe Trump might need to suspend the appropriations process until things are put right.

What can’t happen is Republicans going wobbly on the shutdown.

What also can’t happen is Republicans tanking the filibuster. The filibuster is certainly a royal pain in the ass, particularly in a day and age when there are practically zero Democrats willing to cross the aisle to allow a final vote even on federal funding levels they’ve already approved in the past, but eliminating it just to avoid the momentary pain of a shutdown has to be a nonstarter. Under no circumstances should we play around with the idea that 50 votes plus a vice president is enough to pass major legislation through the Senate — at that point, we’re a lot less of a republic than we are even now.

Solving this problem by taking on that one is a very bad trade.

No. The Dems are going to have to buckle. They’re going to have to surrender. The rest of us will have to do what we can to minimize what’s coming — whether that means donating to the local food bank, volunteering in our communities, giving to legitimate charities, or whatever — so that we can win this.

Those efforts might actually strengthen our communities in ways we’ve allowed to deteriorate with all this federal government dependence, you know.

But what can’t happen is that Chuck Schumer, Temu Obama, and Krazy Katherine Clark get proven right when they spew about how they’ve got “leverage” by making people suffer who are mostly their voters.

Johnson has performed beautifully during this shutdown. He’s beaten the Democrats again and again in the rhetorical fight. It’s been almost Churchillian, with the caveat that for most of us, the shutdown is absolutely not akin to the Blitz.

But he’s only got 218 votes to work with. And that means his caucus has to stay strong, as off-brand for the GOP as that might be.

I’ll even give credit to John Thune on the Senate side, as he’s held his caucus together quite well over the past 23 days. I don’t know if I would have bet on that. There are probably more Republican squishes in the Senate than there are in the House, out of essentially a quarter as many caucus members.

Perhaps these guys recognize just how insane the Democrats are, and how backed up against a wall our country is, with $38 trillion in debt and a balanced budget nowhere in sight, and a manifest need to stop funding our own destruction with social services doled out to illegal aliens and willingly unproductive American citizens. I hope that’s true. It’s certainly a recognition that a majority of Americans share, and my sense is that the majority will reward Republicans in the coming election cycle if they stand strong.

Johnson is the essential man here, though. If he remains iron, this fight will be won. The Democrats can’t count on their old tricks anymore. Nobody cares what NBC News says in pumping out leftist propaganda about the shutdown, and the GOP voting base isn’t going to be undermined by performative abuses as it was when Team Obama was in the White House.

They will fold.

And when they do, perhaps we can finally get to the point where a Republican majority begins training Temu Obama and whoever will take over for Schumer after the Left he’s been pandering to finally eats him in the finer points of legislation, minority-style. Meaning that if you want something from the majority, you’d better be prepared to bring something to the table.

They don’t currently have that understanding. All they know is name-calling and pressure tactics. And this shutdown is a very good crucible in which to break them of that knowledge.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

America’s Progressive Descent Into Psychosis

‘Old Fart’ Thinking Is Too Much in Our Way

Feminism, the Nose-Ring Theory, and Our Potential Extinction