What was this all for?
A few days ago, that question would not have been difficult to answer. The government shutdown was about cuts to Obamacare subsidies that were poised to cause the cost of health care to skyrocket for millions—and that would likely destroy the Affordable Care Act itself. It was about an increasingly lawless and authoritarian administration that had simply stopped participating in normal politics, preferring instead to deploy armed goons in communities across the country. It was about fighting back against a rogue regime to the enthusiastic hurrahs of a base that only last week came out to the polls to deal a hammer blow to the GOP.
What is there to say now that eight Democratic moderates—with the barely disguised backing of party leader Chuck Schumer and all-but-certain coordination from some of the Democratic senators pretending to have been against the decision—voted to reopen the government in exchange for practically nothing? A few days ago, the Democrats had all the leverage in the world. The Republicans had none. It didn’t matter. The Democrats bailed out Trump and his Capitol Hill supplicants. They threw millions of people under the bus. For what? They protected the filibuster so they wouldn’t be tempted to use it to make people’s lives better the next time they take power. Besides that? Nothing.
There are many villains here. Abigail Spanberger, the newly elected governor of Virginia, went on Meet the Press to give political cover to the renegades, undercutting her party, and demanding that they reopen the government—her interview was shared widely with her fellow Democrats. (Shivving her party after they’ve won an election is something of a Spanberger special.)
The New Hampshire delegation should be singled out for special excoriation—the retiring Jeanne Shaheen, along with Maggie Hassan, led the negotiations with Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and the independent (and probably retiring) Angus King. They were joined by another soon-to-depart colleague in Dick Durbin, two others whose terms run until 2030 (Jacky Rosen and Tim Kaine), and one who is John Fetterman (John Fetterman). Underlining every comment they have made to the press is a staggering admission of their own sense of helplessness.
You may have looked at the Democratic response over the last 40 days as a party that was finally standing up for itself. There is every indication that this caught Trump entirely by surprise, the fact that Senate Democrats were suddenly vertebrates. But since Republicans and the president were moving no closer to a deal, Senate Democrats decided it was time to give up. “Most of us here … have voted repeatedly with the Democratic strategy,” Kaine said. “But after 40 days, it wasn’t gonna work.” Angus King, meanwhile, put it even more bluntly: “Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work.” (“Standing up to Trump” was previously thought to be the single biggest reason to elect opposition senators. King offered little detail on how he and the Democratic caucus will redefine their duties in light of this new mission.)
The biggest villain of them all, however, is someone who cast a kayfabe vote against the deal on Monday. No one bears the weight of the failed shutdown as much as Chuck Schumer.
His “no” vote is particularly galling because it leaves only two options on the table. The first is that the eight Democrats who broke away from their party did so without his knowledge or consent, a conclusion that could only suggest that Schumer has lost control of his caucus. The second is that the moderates were negotiating with Schumer’s knowledge, approval, and encouragement and that the “no” vote was just to conceal that—and maybe as a kind of consolation prize to the other Democrats in his caucus. This suggests that Schumer has lost any ability to organize or think politically or strategically. Regardless of the reason, he needs to step down immediately.
Schumer’s “no” vote was a cynical bit of theater, in other words, but reporting has consistently suggested that the moderates were always negotiating with his knowledge and tacit approval: Schumer wanted this too. He sold out his party to get it.
There are a few explanations as to why. The first is that, like several others in his party, Schumer worried that Republicans really were going to nuke the last vestiges of the filibuster and he needed to step in to save it: The price for upholding a Senate norm rooted in slavery was just Obamacare and the one little bit of leverage Democrats had over an authoritarian president.
The second is that Schumer never really had a shutdown strategy. Yes, his party was winning. Yes, Trump and his fellow Republicans were watching their approval ratings plummet. But there was never really a Democratic exit plan, and Schumer failed to press the case—expanding the shutdown argument to include, say, ending the continued military occupation of Washington, D.C., or the tariffs that are choking the American economy.
Not only that, Schumer was clearly uncomfortable with the fact that this was a political shutdown intended to damage the administration and the party in power. He and his fellow Democrats had momentum. They had a winning hand. But they were queasy. Fixing Obamacare subsidies, moreover, would take one issue off the table for the midterm elections—and force the party to talk about subjects it’s less comfortable discussing—namely, Trump’s fascistic deportation regime.
And so, they folded a winning hand. Yes, they caved because many Democrats are uncomfortable exercising power and because they lack a coherent or compelling vision for their party or how it would run the country. But the shortest answer for why Democrats caved is that Chuck Schumer is the party’s leader in the Senate. The fish rots from the head.
