In a last-ditch Monday showdown to avert a government shutdown, talks between Republicans and Democrats collapsed. Vice President J.D. Vance and House Majority Leader Mike Johnson held a news conference accusing Democrats of hypocritical “hostage-taking” over the negotiations, even as Democratic leaders continued to insist that Republicans will be blamed if the government goes dark.

Vance began, indicating that because of the crazy things Democrats – who are in the minority, by the way – were demanding, a shutdown was imminent:

“We have disagreements…but you don’t shut the government down.”

“You don’t put a gun to the American people’s head and say, unless you do exactly what Senate and House Democrats want you to do, we’re going to shut down your government.”

“Now, we have to remember they’re very frustrated. They say that they’re very frustrated about the fact that this negotiation has not taken place until today.”

“But if you look at the original, the original thing they did with this negotiation, it was a $1.5 trillion spending package, basically saying to the American people, we want to give massive amounts of money, hundreds of billions of dollars to illegal aliens for their health care, while Americans are struggling to pay their health care bills.”

“We thought it was absurd. We told them it was absurd, and now they come in here saying that if you don’t give us everything that we that we want, we’re going to shut down the government. We think that’s preposterous. We think it’s totally unacceptable.”

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Shutdown fights are the most performative, tedious circus in politics — mainly because Democrats long ago mastered the art of playing both sides and blaming Republicans no matter who’s actually in the room.

Here’s the simple pattern: if Democrats want a shutdown, it’s suddenly “Republicans’ fault” for being obstructionist. If Republicans refuse bad deals, they’re accused of sabotage. If Republicans pass a clean continuing resolution and Democrats torpedo it, the GOP still gets the blame. It’s clown-nose-on, clown-nose-off gaslighting, repeated by the mainstream press until everyone forgets which side actually did what.

For his part, the Speaker lit into Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to expose the wasteful demands:

Now, there’s a reason that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have come out here to stomp their feet, saying that they can’t go along with this. They’re trying to bring in extraneous issues. They issued a counterproposal. You should go take a look at what they requested. $1.5 trillion in new spending that is unrelated to the ongoing appropriations process.

They wanted to, as you said, restore taxpayer-funded benefits? Okay, hardworking taxpayers in America, they want to they want to take your funds and give them to illegal aliens. They want to restore that because we got rid of it. They want it. They want to prop up left-leaning media outlets. 500 million they threw in on top of that, $1.5 trillion on a seven-week stopgap funding measure.

We’re not going to do that. They know we can’t do that, and we never have. In the past, during the Biden administration, there were 13 threatened shutdowns. The Republicans in the minority did the right thing. We kept the government open. We’re simply asking for the Democrats to do the same…

…If the Democrats make the decision to shut the government down, the consequences are on them, and I think it’s absolutely tragic.

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Republicans need to keep pounding this point relentlessly. In past shutdown fights the script has always been the same: if a minority won’t back a clean continuing resolution, that minority “causes” the shutdown. Why should the rulebook flip now? If Democrats get to rewrite the standard, they’ll effectively govern from the minority by threatening shutdown after shutdown until they extract every pet policy. That’s a raw power grab — and an insult to the voters who put Republicans in charge.

Yes, the polls and the mainstream press will likely try to pin blame on the GOP. Maybe that happens — but it must not dictate strategy. Caving to avoid bad headlines only hands Democrats a weapon for the next fight. Republicans will take heat no matter what; the right move is to stand firm, defend the majority’s mandate, and refuse to let shutdown brinksmanship become the new normal.