For more on the looming government shutdown and President Trump's expanding use of executive power,

I'm joined now by our Politics Monday duo.

That is Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

Great to see you both.

Let's pick up where some of the reporting and conversations left off there.

Amy, you know, we have covered near shutdown battles before.

We saw back earlier this spring, though, Chuck Schumer decided to vote with Republicans to keep

the government open, caught a lot of flack for that. What is different for Democrats this time

around? Are they approaching this differently? They're absolutely approaching this differently,

and they are looking back to that moment moment especially. The base of the Democratic Party so fired up, so insistent on party

leaders going and facing off against Donald Trump. They feel like the party itself, as you see,

those low approval ratings for the Democrats,

a lot of that comes from Democratic members of the party who say, our leaders are feckless,

they're not fighting hard enough. So that's a big piece of this.

The second piece is they found an issue on which to center this argument. And that's an issue that

Democrats have been successful in fighting on, the issue

of health care. And so that as I was talking to a Democrat today, the point that they were making

to me is, even if this, whatever the outcome of this shutdown is, the issue of health care

is going to be an important one in 2026. So sort of

setting a marker today for a fight that Democrats would like to have going into the midterms.

Tam, what about from the White House perspective on this and Republicans? As Lisa was reporting

earlier, they seem to think Democrats will get blamed for a shutdown.

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