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Senate Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday announced the first hint of progress in negotiations over the government shutdown. The chamber has scheduled procedural votes on two separate bills for Thursday: one that would fund the government through February 8, and one that represents President Donald Trump’s opening bid for ending the standoff. Some experienced Capitol Hill observers are underwhelmed by the news:

Senate reaches critical deal to take failed cloture votes

I know this is an agreement to take two failed votes, but am I missing something?

Isn’t it tougher on Senate Republicans to vote against a clean CR to reopen government than it is for Senate Dems to vote against wall money + immigration changes + government funding?

A breakthrough, then, this is not. That would require a good-faith proposal from the president. Instead, he has put forth a lopsided deal that was reportedly crafted in negotiations between Vice President Mike Pence, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—hardly a stirring example of bipartisanship. Democrats rightly will reject it on Thursday, just as Republicans likely will reject the proposal to reopen the government while negotiations over the wall continue.

As expected, the proposal includes $5.7 billion in funding for Trump’s proposed wall along the southern border. In return, it would grant a three-year extension to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shields roughly 700,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation. It also offers to extend the Temporary Protected Status program, which protects thousands of immigrants who have fled natural disasters or civil wars in their home countries.

It was Trump himself who, over the last two years, ordered an end to DACA and placed TPS recipients at risk for deportation, so his shutdown offer amounts to a hostage-taking. Since the extensions would be temporary, he wouldn’t even be releasing the hostages. But Trump still pitched his proposal as a moderate, sensible solution to the deadlock. “Border security, DACA, TPS, and many other things—straightforward, fair, reasonable, and common sense, with lots of compromise,” he told the country in an address from the White House on Saturday.

When Senate Republicans published the full legislative text of the proposal on Monday night, it soon became clear that their bargain had no hope of becoming law. Immigration lawyers and experts quickly discovered that the proposal would rewrite the DACA and the TPS programs to water down both their scope and their protections. The bill would also impose onerous new restrictions on some asylum applications that, if enacted, may violate U.S. humanitarian treaty commitments. The bill doesn’t show a way out of the shutdown standoff through compromise and conciliation. If anything, it makes compromise even less likely than before.

Trump’s proposal would create a new form of legal status called “provisional protected status” for DACA and TPS recipients. The bill would only apply to TPS recipients from four countries: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Pending expirations for recipients from Nepal and Sudan are still set to lapse without congressional action, while protections for recipients from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that expired in 2017 won’t be renewed. (Sudan’s status was scheduled to expire last November, but a federal judge ordered that it be kept in effect last October.)

Rather than simply extend the current legal status for DACA and TPS recipients, Trump’s proposal would essentially require them to reapply for it—this time, under legal thresholds normally used for immigrants suspected of marriage fraud. Other parts of the bill appeared to be aimed at dissuading asylum applications in the first place. One unusual provision, for example, would also require TPS recipients to reimburse the federal government for any tax credits they benefited from while living in the United States. Since some TPS recipients have lived in the country for more than a decade, those costs could be a crushing financial burden. David J. Bier, an immigration policy analyst for the Cato Institute, wrote on Twitter that the provision was “totally unprecedented in the history of immigration law.”

Most of the changes to asylum law focus on Central American minors, a group of applicants whose requests for asylum have drawn the most coverage in recent years. Under current law, anyone seeking asylum can apply regardless of whether or not they entered the country with legal authorization. Trump, hoping to keep asylum-seekers from first entering the U.S., issued an executive order barring applications from those who didn’t present themselves at a port of entry. But a federal judge in California blocked the order from going into effect in November, and the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to overturn that injunction in December.

Trump’s proposal essentially asks Congress to let it do what the courts won’t allow. A key provision would require Central American minors to submit applications for asylum at U.S. processing centers in their home countries or neighboring ones, thereby undermining the entire premise of the legal right. “Asylum is a form of relief for people who are being persecuted in their home countries and the authorities there are unable or unwilling to protect them (or are the source of the persecution),” Gabriel Malor, a contributor to The Federalist, wrote on Twitter. “You can’t condition asylum on people remaining in the place where they are persecuted.”

Under the bill, only 50,000 Central American minors would be allowed to apply for asylum each year, and only 15,000 of those applications would be accepted. Determining which applicants would be granted asylum wouldn’t be left to immigration courts, but Department of Homeland Security officials. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration lawyer and analyst for the American Immigration Council, noted on Twitter that the bill explicitly shields those officials’ conclusions from judicial review by the federal courts.

The draconian terms make the proposal a non-starter for Democrats. So why make it at all? Trump, a reality-TV maven at heart, has never shied away from placing theatricality ahead of reality. By proposing an end to the shutdown, no matter how far-fetched it may be, he is hoping to shift public pressure onto the Democrats by casting them as the obstructive ones. (Polls show that Americans largely blame Trump and his party for the shutdown and its worsening effects.)

It’s not unusual for dealmakers to make an aggressive opening offer that can be pared back during negotiations. What’s striking about Trump’s proposal isn’t its boldness, but its underlying malice. The North Star of the president’s immigration policy has always been cruelty towards those who pass through the system. By pitching such an extreme proposal, Trump is essentially asking Democrats and the American public to participate in that cruelty to a degree of their own choosing. The only moral choice is to not participate at all.

Amid the many tributes paid to the late George H.W. Bush last November, an understandable minority dwelt on the moment when Bush became the first sitting president to throw up on a major ally. After 16 time zones in 10 days and a dose of flu en route, a dish of sushi pushed the president over the edge—and his stomach’s contents into Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s lap during a Tokyo state dinner.

Any red faces over the historic incident have paled with time. Comedians, naturally, had a field day, and Bush even managed a weak quip in the moment, winking at his physician to “Roll me under the table until the dinner’s over.” A sense of humor, and prevailing aura of presidential dignity, helped to save face.

The preservation of prestige has always been a larger component of foreign relations than many observers would care to admit. Now, nearly three decades after Bush’s Tokyo mishap, the game is again playing out, but with very different players, in East Asia. While the ongoing brinkmanship contest between President Trump and his chief rival, China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping, involves two vastly different personalities and political systems, it’s clear both share similar dysfunctions and needs: pride, nationalism, rampant paranoia (creating a tendency to box themselves into narrow policy choices), and an obsession with loyalty and face. 

The concept of face is often misunderstood or overemphasized in simplistic analyses of Chinese culture, but its overarching importance in maintaining hierarchy and status is unquestionable. Xi or those close to him have a rich history of nixing insufficiently dignified nicknames. Only a few years ago, propaganda chiefs had encouraged the affectionate moniker “Big Daddy” or “Uncle” Xi—until suddenly, for whatever reason, such endearments became politically unpalatable; grassroots titles, including the similarly cuddly “steamed bun” or “Winnie the Pooh,” are meanwhile considered outrageous slurs. Even allies are not permitted a hint of mischief—in 2017, apparatchiks rushed to censor an exchange in which Xi’s pal Putin jokingly called him a “lone warrior” when the Chinese delegation arrived late to a meeting.

If Xi is obsessed with maintaining face, Trump delights chiefly in others losing theirs. In 2016, when a disagreement on the runway forced President Obama to use the rear staircase of Air Force One instead of the traditional red carpet on a state visit to Beijing, the then-candidate openly gloated over the president’s supposed snub, and said that he would’ve left the G20 summit over such a matter. During his campaign, Trump promised pointedly to offer Xi a McDonald’s hamburger in lieu of a state dinner  should he ever visit a Trump White House. In April 2017, Trump in fact served Xi chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago, but still upstaged his guest by casually launching his administration’s first missile strike during dinner. 

These sort of remarks and acts baffle Beijing. What, they wonder, is going on with this guy—what’s he really thinking? If a lavish “state plus plus” dinner in Beijing, as was lavished on Trump, didn’t soothe the American president’s ego, what, if anything, will? They have tried flattery and backdoor channels, attempted cooling the rhetoric of the Made in China 2025 plan, and thrown in icy vows “not to be bullied”; all the usual moves. By the summer of 2018, a columnist in Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily was referring to “lunatic ravings”; a separate editorial spluttered about a U.S. administration that had “lost reason and is nearly insane.” While the publication is close enough to Party leadership to reflect genuine misgivings, neither piece can be read as representing an official Party position on the American administration—which has yet to emerge. Seeking to defuse trade talks without showing concession, Xi and his advisers are faced with a curious reversal of roles.

In the decades when Chairman Mao ruled an isolationist People’s Republic of China, foreign experts would peer over the border from Hong Kong and attempt to decode what was happening in Beijing using recondite scraps of gossip, state media, smuggled texts, and defectors’ tales. “Pekingology” was an industry of guesswork and experience, largely practiced by seasoned spies, obscure academics, and journalists who would pore over black-and-white photos of the Politburo in an attempt to guess the significance of each member’s positioning. It was painstaking, teeth-grinding work; “Does Logic Help?” a heading in the CIA’s “The Art of China-Watching” manual, published in 1975, wondered.

Now Trump poses a similar conundrum for the Chinese. Neither ideology nor convention offer much guide to unpacking the forty-fifth president’s long-term goals. To figure out whether Trump is guided, at any particular moment, by ego, self-interest, whim, or whichever one of his motley clan of ever-changing advisers and cronies is running the show backstage, experts in Beijing can only check POTUS tweets for whether they’re sent from an Android or iPhone, or puzzle over which of Trump’s circle of supposed surrogates or advisers best speaks for him.

Is it Michael Pillsbury, the ex-Sinophile mentioned in Trump’s press conferences, who now preaches the Yellow Peril Gospel in his The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower? University of California Irvine Professor Peter Navarro, an adviser whose views on Beijing can be well inferred from his documentary Death by China? U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who has taken the lead in Chinese trade negotiations? Former journalist, marine, and China hand Matthew Pottinger, at the National Security Council? What about trusted “old friends” such as Hank Paulson or Henry Kissinger? Who knows? Beijing’s analysts will only find their own “inscrutability” reflected back at them, inversely: Instead of the Communist Party’s studied waxwork opacity, the opacity of Trump comes with an endless excess of misinformation, mendacity, and contradiction. Like students of Xi Jinping Thought who try to marshal disparate comments and policies into something resembling a cohesive plan, Trumpkinologists face an exercise in painful futility: the putative study of a vacuum.

Beijing started out projecting confidence. “China has a lot of experience in taming a new American president, and Trump should be no exception,” an editorial in the Chinese edition of the Global Times confidently affirmed, belying any initial shock at the billionaire’s victory. “China is used to dealing with businessmen, and in this way, he may be easier to handle than Hillary,” claimed Jin Canrong, a high-profile international relations professor.

Only in recent months has the tone changed. By some accounts bewildered, Chinese officials now affect admiration. “I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by his skill as a strategist and tactician,” wrote Mark Leonard in the Financial Times in July 2018, amidst the impact of the tariff contest. Although it’s possible, even likely, officials were feeding remarks intended to inveigle Trump (even depicting him, for example, as a “Sun Tzu-like strategic genius”), he has genuine admirers among their ranks. Some Chinese buy into the “successful businessman” blather, and see a pragmatic venerable elder—something he would have to be to have survived in China—rather than an aging grifter, as he is more usually seen in the West. 

At 72, Trump, after all, is only two years older than the People’s Republic will be in October; none of its leaders could have successfully endured his repeated humiliations, bankruptcies, or public exposures without being arrested or disappeared. It’s widely believed, for example, that the country’s youngest billionaire, 42-year-old Jack Ma, did not volunteer his own resignation as CEO of e-commerce giant Alibaba last summer, but privately accepted it. As overseer of both a vast Amazon-like structure, and digital payment network, Ma was close to commanding an enterprise larger than his own government, and arguably too rich to jail. Trump’s dogged survival skills may impress those for whom politics and business is more literally a life-or-death daily struggle. 

If China’s negotiators truly have arrived at a state of puzzled esteem (a debatable thesis, as Trump’s thirst for flattery has become an international punchline at this point), it may also have something to do with disillusionment at his opponent: Xi’s star does not shine as brightly as it once did. The days when the General Secretary could make a speech at the UN about women’s rights, or laud free markets at Davos, and the media would broadly sing along, have petered out. The once and future reformist, strongman, and free-market debutante seems diminished, even if no one in his circle or society is telling him so. His lack of momentum is the source of an entire system encompassing many careers and institutes: the Xi Jinping Thought industry, dedicated to analyzing the Chinese leader’s “hodgepodge of Dengist and Maoist terminology” and “vague ideas,” as The Economist once summed it up, into submission—or at least something resembling an ideology.

Trump’s popularity with certain Chinese elites is likely to make Xi more paranoid than ever. Like other PRC leaders, Xi is largely insulated from public opinion, and seemed barely able to field even a single question without losing composure at the only foreign press conference he’s ever assented to, in 2014. PRC politics is opaque by design, with Xi’s dogma and rhetoric boring all but the most dedicated observers into disinterest. American politics is, by contrast, a smorgasbord of openly competing interests, with rapidly shifting dynamics. Trump exults in the office, but detests the responsibilities; Xi, meanwhile, is minutely obsessed with controlling all aspects of governance. Trump courts attention, and is perpetually aghast at seeing his inadequacies paraded by the press; Xi crushes critics, then demands their adulation.

When Bush lost his dinner in 1992, his Japanese hosts discreetly declined to air any footage on public television. Now, the overseas-facing English-language Twitter for People’s Daily Online openly trolls Trump. “One by one,” the account tweeted with a smiley face, upon news of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s departure from the Trump administration.

Xi’s personality of cult and centralization of power has caused many to compare him to Mao. In fact, Xi’s obsession with order bears little resemblance to Mao, who ruled through division, turning lieutenants upon lieutenants, purging rivals. Mao delighted in turmoil, urging his base to unleash havoc at mass rallies. “All under heaven is in chaos,” his motto ran. “The situation is excellent.” Of today’s leaders, the one who most closely hews to this playbook is not Mao’s successor, but his American rival.

The federal government’s partial shutdown enters its second month this week, and there is no end in sight. It does not matter that the American public largely wants the government to reopen, or that the shutdown inflicts a growing economic and environmental toll on the nation. President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, who have majority control of the government, are in no hurry to reopen it.

And why should they be? The shutdown’s ostensible purpose is to secure funding for Trump’s wall. But crippling the government advances other goals as well. Conservatives often rail against the “administrative state,” their term of derision for federal agencies and the “bureaucrats” who staff them. What more effective way to deplete the state’s strength and efficacy than by forcing scores of experienced and talented civil servants into either poverty or other jobs?

Conservatives are hardly subtle about this. Earlier this month, an unnamed “senior Trump official” published an op-ed in The Daily Caller celebrating the suffering that he and his colleagues had inflicted on federal workers. “Federal employees are starting to feel the strain of the shutdown,” the anonymous author wrote. “I am one of them. But for the sake of our nation, I hope it lasts a very long time, till the government is changed and can never return to its previous form.” Trump himself retweeted his son’s approval of the article.

The shutdown highlights a fundamental asymmetry in American governance today. It’s a familiar trope for political observers to blame both sides in Washington for gridlock. In reality, congressional dysfunction and government shutdowns typically hinder progressives’ policy goals, which generally require passing new legislation, while furthering conservative ones. So the increasing paralysis of Washington has redounded to the benefit of the Republicans.

After the 2010 midterms, when the Democratic Party lost its unified control of government, President Barack Obama sought to circumvent this problem through his executive authority. His administration used regulatory action to advance progressive goals on protecting LGBT rights, raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers, combating climate change, and more. He also tested the limits of the presidency’s power by temporarily shielding millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and making illegal recess appointments to executive-branch posts that require Senate confirmation.

Now armed with that executive power himself, Trump is trying to undo much of what his predecessor accomplished with it. The contrast between Trump’s successes there and his party’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act is telling. Progressives’ best hope for durable policy achievements is legislation, not regulation—which is why the party’s central goal must be to reform American democracy itself.

Democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential election will spend the next two years discussing their varied approaches to policy. Plenty of ink will be spilled on their particular approaches to health care, climate change, labor, and so on. But whether a candidate supports the Green New Deal or Medicare for All doesn’t matter as much as whether they will commit themselves to aggressive structural political reform. Without that, any progressive gains when Democrats next control the House, the Senate, and the presidency will be fleeting and insubstantial.

There are signs that some Democratic leaders are waking up to this problem. Obama and his former attorney general, Eric Holder, are focusing their resources on reforming partisan gerrymandering, which tilts the congressional map toward Republicans so heavily that Democrats had to win a wave election in the 2018 midterms to secure a modest House majority. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a package of anti-corruption reforms in the Senate last year; Speaker Nancy Pelosi proposed similar legislation earlier this month to bolster voting rights and reform campaign-finance laws.

A key obstacle is the Electoral College, which makes it possible for a candidate to win the presidency without winning the most votes. The Democratic nominee won the popular vote in six out of the last seven presidential elections, but Republicans still took the White House in three of those races. Abolishing the Electoral College outright through a constitutional amendment would require the approval of the small states that benefit the most from it. So Democrats in multiple states are trying to circumvent it through an interstate compact that would automatically award those states’ electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. States with a combined 172 votes have already signed on; the agreement will take effect once that total reaches the magic number, 270.

The greatest obstacle, however, may be the Senate itself. Like the Electoral College, the chamber has a structural rural bias that lends Republicans disproportionate power. But Mitch McConnell’s reign over the chamber has also showed how it can be a mortal threat to basic governance. The Kentucky senator, who proudly declared that his top goal after the 2008 election was to make sure Obama would be a one-term president, often rejected policy negotiations with Democrats so he could blame Obama for the resulting dysfunction. His iron grip on the Senate’s flow of business amid the current shutdown shows how Republicans’ structural advantage in one legislative chamber gives them an undemocratic veto on the country’s political agenda.

Some observers have also proposed scrapping the legislative filibuster, which would reduce the need for Democrats to obtain buy-ins on major legislation from conservative members and moderate Republicans. Some 2020 contenders like Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand have also backed statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Creating two new states would strengthen democracy in both places and dilute the Republicans’ structural advantage in the Senate. But there’s also no reason to stop there: full statehood for American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands would also be a good idea if those territories desire it.

British lawmakers used a similar maneuver to bring their upper legislative chamber to heel in the early twentieth century. David Lloyd George, the Liberal Party’s chancellor of the exchequer, first introduced what became known as the “People’s Budget” in 1909. It proposed a vast expansion of the nation’s social safety net that would be financed itself through aggressive tax hikes on landowners and the wealthiest British citizens. The House of Lords’ members naturally refused to pass a budget that would tax themselves so heavily, even after the Liberals had won another general election and a clear popular mandate for it. What began as a policy dispute had become a constitutional crisis.

Lloyd George found a radical solution. With King George V’s support, he threatened to elevate hundreds of new Liberal dukes, viscounts, and barons to take control of the House of Lords and pass reforms that would strip away the Lords’ ability to block legislation. The aristocracy backed down in 1910 and approved the budget, but Lloyd George and the Commons persisted in forcing them to accept the Parliament Act the following year, which replaced the Lords’ ability to vote down legislation with the power to delay it for two years. Creating a dozen new Senate seats out of territories long deprived of influence in Congress seems almost tame by comparison.

As dramatic as it may sound, there is abundant precedent for reshaping the Senate’s balance of power through new states. Early American statesmen regularly used the creation of free and slave states to maintain the political equilibrium between the North and the South before the Civil War. When Southern senators withdrew from the Senate to join the rebellion in 1860, the Republican Party suddenly found itself able to pass a wave of stymied legislation: land-grant colleges, a transcontinental railroad, the first federal income tax, and more. Statehood also bypasses the unique obstacle of Article V of the Constitution, which forbids the ratification of amendments that alter any state’s “equal representation” in the Senate unless the state itself consents to the changes.

Bold political reforms often went hand-in-hand with social and economic reforms throughout American history. Radical Republicans and black freedpeople fought to build a multiracial democracy in the South and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, laying the groundwork for future civil rights triumphs. Reformers in the Progressive Era passed universal suffrage for women and mandated the direct election of senators. The 1950s and 1960s saw the end of poll taxes and literacy tests, the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the establishment of the “one man, one vote” principle by the Supreme Court.

But progressives today have given short shrift to potential structural changes to the American political system. At the same time, Republicans haven’t been shy about using their political power over the past decade to mold the nation’s political structures in their favor, whether through aggressive partisan gerrymandering, a wave of restrictive voting laws, or refusing to let Obama change the Supreme Court’s ideological balance. These successes have made it even more difficult for Democrats to capture and hold the House, the Senate, and the presidency simultaneously. But when they do, in 2020 or later, they have to be ready to use the opportunity to untilt the balance of power. Because they may not get another one.