We’ve been warning about it on The BradCast ever since the government re-opened after the last shutdown, its longest ever, in October and November. There now seems to be no way to avoid another shutdown as of midnight Friday, a former White House and Senate budget expert explains on today’s ‘BradCast’. But, he also notes, “this is the right thing to shut down the government for.” [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
BUT FIRST… A couple of other news items of note today…
- The first special elections since the murder of Veterans Affairs Intensive Care Unit nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis were held on Tuesday, to determine partisan control of the Minnesota state House of Representatives. Two vacant seats in very Democratic-leaning parts of the Twin Cities region were up for grabs. One featured a Democrat who ran unopposed. (Spoiler: she won.) The other featured a Democratic candidate running against a Republican who had run for the same seat, and lost, in both 2022 and 2024. It’s a district where Kamala Harris won by 71 points. On Tuesday, the Democratic candidate, Meg Luger-Nikolai, won the election by more than 91 points! That’s a 20-point swing for the Ds, as Luger-Nikolai garnered more than 95% of the vote. Her Republican challenger won just over 4%. If Republicans weren’t worried about this year’s midterms before, Tuesday night’s results oughta put the fear of God into ’em.
- Speaking of elections, Donald Trump is still pretending he won the one that he lost in 2020 to Joe Biden. To that end, Trump has weaponized his FBI and today, they were ordered to raid the Fulton County (Atlanta) elections warehouse. Reportedly, the federal agents were there to collect ballots and other materials from the 2020 election, which have been retained by court order since then. Supposedly, this will finally provide Trump the evidence of massive “voter fraud” that he has alleged for so many years. If the Georgia Republican Sec. of State was unwilling back in January of 2021 to “find 11,780 votes” to help Trump steal the state’s election that year, by golly, Trump is gonna “find” them himself now, five years later.
THEN… U.S. border patrol agents have fired shots 16 times over the course of the past year. In every instance, as WaPo reported yesterday, the Trump Administration declared the shootings to have been justified before any probe had been completed. Four U.S. citizens have been shot in those incidents. Two of them were killed over the past three weeks in Minneapolis.
While Trump is putting up a show of “softening” his stance on the federal government’s invasion of the Twin Cities region by ICE and CBP, Greg Sargent argues that it’s little more than posturing because Trump is now “frightened” that Democrats in Congress will shut the government down again unless serious restrictions are placed on funding for the Dept. of Homeland Security‘s immigration goon squads.
Senate Democrats, for their part, seem quite serious about doing just that, as the deadline for a new, 2026 government spending bill is midnight on Friday. With the House in recess, any changes made to the six funding bills they adopted before leaving, couldn’t be voted on back in the House until they reconvene next week. That virtually guarantees at least a brief shutdown. To make things worse, Senate Republicans have been unwilling to decouple the DHS/ICE funding from the other funding bills, to keep the rest of the government open, until they can come to an agreement over new guardrails that Democrats are insisting on for ICE and CPB’s clownish but deadly operations across the country.
“This is the right thing to shut down the government for,” argues our guest, BOBBY KOGAN, today. He served as an advisor to the White House Office of Management and Budget under President Biden and, before that, as Senior Advisor on the Senate Budget Committee. He is now Senior Director of Federal Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress.
Kogan argues that “there is nothing more more quintessential than fighting government oppression.” He tells me that he has long argued that nothing is more important to society than “shelter, food and healthcare. I’m the person who says that’s the quintessential thing. But, actually, not being executed by the government is the most quintessential thing — not being executed by the government for existing, and just filming them — this is a thing you have to shut down the government for.”
But at what cost? How many other unrelated agencies will also have to be closed for a time in the bargain? How many Americans will be harmed by those closures? And what exactly are Democrats insisting on in exchange for approving another $10 billion for ICE, after the Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” already established a $75 billion slush fund for the out-of-control agency just last Summer?
In addition to guarantees that they will follow the law and the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy with judicial warrants during raids of private homes, Kogan says that Democrats are coalescing on a number of demands, including mandated body cams during enforcement actions and DOJ civil rights reviews of federal government shootings. He also believes that someone, such as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, will need to be fired, and that clawing back some of that $75 billion granted to ICE last year would also be “a good idea.”
“We gave money to the IRS [during the Biden Administration], and as soon as they came to power,” he explains, Republicans rescinded much of that money. He suggests Dems should do the same thing as well with the $75 billion that ICE received last year with no-strings-attached.
“There’s not much leverage that the Democratic Party has because it is in the minority,” Kogan concedes. “But you have to try. Because what else can you possibly do? This is one of the few must-pass bills that still exist. Government shutdowns cannot go on forever because eventually everything starts to break. So it’s only a little bit of leverage, but you’ve got to use it.”
Based on his conversations with Democrats in Congress, he tells me, they are not in the mood for “pinky promises from the administration that is busy executing U.S. citizens” when it comes to vows of course corrections. So, he assesses, “the most likely outcome is a six bill shutdown.”
“Will it work? I don’t know,” Kogan asserts. “But Democrats owe it to the American people to do the best they can. Because it is not just political whims or whatever that matters. It matters to real people. And it matters to history. How we respond to this is going to shape what we are as a nation. So Democrats owe it to the American people to give it their all.”
FINALLY… The legendary Bruce Springsteen released a new song today via social media called The Streets of Minneapolis. In his announcement, he explained that he “wrote this song on Saturday [the day Alex Pretti was killed], recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.” He added: “Stay free.”
We share his moving — and inspiring — tune, in full, to close out today’s program…
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