What if they held a government shutdown and nobody noticed?

That is admittedly a facetious way to put things, but the phrase has been popping into my mind over the past month. Democrats in Congress have partially shut the federal government down, but the issue has all but disappeared from the news, even though the shutdown is now about to enter its second month. There has been no progress whatsoever on any sort of deal or compromise, but the whole thing isn't being treated as any sort of crisis or emergency at all.

This is partly due to government shutdowns becoming almost a regular thing in Washington. Over the past few decades, shutting the government down has gone from being treated as an existential crisis to something people merely shrug over: "Oh, are they doing that shutdown thing again? Whatever...." After all, the government employees affected always get their back pay restored to them and perhaps the National Parks are closed down for a while, but it doesn't really affect most people's lives all that much. Because it has become such a ho-hum news subject, the media doesn't pay as much attention to it any more, which makes it even less of a relevant subject to the public.

This time around is even worse (in terms of not gaining much public attention), because only one federal department is affected -- all the others have been fully funded through the end of the federal fiscal year. The Department of Homeland Security is the only remaining department without a budget for the year. So nothing else the federal government does (including visible things like the National Parks) is even affected.

Democrats made this move to force Donald Trump and the Republicans to rein in ICE and other federal immigration agencies. The public strongly supports the Democratic position, after seeing masked anonymous federal officers gun down American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis and then just lie through their teeth about what happened. Changes obviously need to be made, which is why Democrats are using budgetary leverage to force them.

Since the Minneapolis murder videos went public, however, Trump and his minions have retreated in a big way. The guy in charge of the Minneapolis besiegement was demoted and sent out to pasture and replaced by someone with a lot more competence and a lot less of a need to terrorize the community with brutal tactics. Kristi Noem was then forced out of her job atop all of D.H.S. The thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents in the city were (for the most part) sent back home. Street sweeps and other random raids either stopped or were severely dialed back. Immigration enforcement as a whole was toned down nationwide. This was all a tacit admission that things had gone too far for the public at large to stomach.

Republicans running for office this year have even been instructed not to talk about "mass deportations" any more, and instead insist that Trump and his henchmen are really only going after "violent criminals." This has set off a fury of debate in the MAGA world, since many of them want Republicans to keep promising mass deportations (they see this effort as a rhetorical retreat, in other words).

But back to the shutdown. Remember the shutdown? It's still going on, after all....

The Democrats' demands are entirely reasonable -- things like: "you must follow the Fourth Amendment," and "cops should not wear masks." The White House and the Republicans are still balking at these demands and refusing to budge. No meaningful negotiations are even taking place. Democrats have offered to fund all the other branches of D.H.S. except the immigration services, but Republicans refuse to let that bill pass. Republicans keep just bringing up a full D.H.S. budget for a vote, which Democrats refuse to let pass.

The irony in all of this is that ICE and the other immigration agencies are still being paid. They haven't missed any paychecks, because last year's Republican budget bill almost literally gave these agencies more money than they knew what to do with. They are swimming in money, so meeting payroll is not a big problem for them right now. The only people affected are people like those who work for the Transportation Security Administration. They are missing paychecks, even though they have nothing to do with border security or immigration enforcement.

This is where the battle for public opinion is going to be fought, at least in the near future. Already there have been some monstrously-long lines at airports, during spring break season. T.S.A. agents aren't paid all that well to begin with, and when they miss paychecks a lot of them are forced to turn to other sources of income (Uber driving, for instance) to make ends meet. But if they're out there driving people around, then they're not at the airport security checkpoints, which is why long lines are starting to appear.

Republicans are betting that growing public pressure to fix this problem will eventually lead to the Democrats caving -- and they might be right. The last government shutdown -- which was a lot wider and a lot more impactful -- ended through precisely such pressures becoming too politically fraught for some Democrats to stomach. Democrats do have the public on their side in the fight over ICE tactics, but since the immigration roundups have abated (to the point where we're not seeing videos of brutality on the streets of American cities on the news every night anymore), the issue has faded from the public's consciousness in a big way. Republicans are going to start pointing to the long airport lines and blame it all on Democrats, which could indeed mean a shift in public opinion.

No matter what happens in the next few weeks (months?), this will still likely be a potent political issue in the midterm campaign season. Democrats will be making the case that the only way to truly rein in Trump's worst impulses is to give them control over one (or both) of the chambers of Congress. Republicans will be insisting that it was all the result of a few overzealous cops and that now everything has gotten back to normal, where only violent criminals are the targets of deportations and aggressive immigration enforcement.

The shutdown itself likely won't end until the media has a slow news week (which is rare, in the Trump era) and starts highlighting the woes of T.S.A. agents and other D.H.S. employees who aren't being paid, and showing enormous lines at the airport security checks on a nightly basis. Democrats, at that point, will either succeed in bringing the attention back to the reasons for the shutdown and arguing their case to the public -- or they will fail to refocus the media's attention and eventually cave in to the pressure to get paychecks to the T.S.A. agents again. That's how shutdowns usually end, after all.

In the meantime, there's a war on and gasoline prices are through the roof and mass shootings and tragic missing persons and, well... there's always the weather to talk about, right? There are so many other things for the media to pay attention to, and a partial government shutdown is way down on their list (at least for now). So the shutdown goes on... and few (if any) people even notice it.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant