POLITICO (“How Senate Republicans won the last vote to end the shutdown“):
Tim Kaine privately laid out weeks ago what he needed in return for his vote to end the government shutdown: a “moratorium on mischief.”
That’s what the Virginia Democrat told Senate Majority Leader John Thune that any deal had to include — undoing the firings President Donald Trump and budget director Russ Vought had carried out since the start of the shutdown, as well as protections against future firings of federal workers, who make up a significant portion of Kaine’s constituency.
It was a demand that Kaine wasn’t sure the White House and Trump would agree to fully meet until the final hours before the nail-biter vote Sunday that cemented a bipartisan breakthrough.
“There was a lot of resistance but they needed my vote,” Kaine said about the GOP reaction to his demands, adding that negotiators “reached a meeting of the minds” at about 5:45 p.m. Sunday.
About five hours later, the Senate voted to move forward with legislation ensuring any federal workers laid off during the shutdown are rehired and blocking future reductions in force, or RIFs, through at least the end of a new Jan. 30 stopgap spending bill.
Most of the attention to the six weeks of shutdown negotiation centered on Democrats’ demands surrounding health care, particularly the extension of key expiring health insurance subsidies. But the RIF language was the final piece that helped clinch the deal, according to interviews with six people involved in the bipartisan negotiations.
With only eight members of the Democratic caucus voting to advance the bill — the bare minimum for it to move forward — satisfying Kaine was critical to ending the conflict largely on the GOP’s terms while also giving Democrats, who have long worried about Trump taking a sledgehammer to the federal government, something to hold up as a consolation prize.
Kaine was, by his own admission, a latecomer to the bipartisan talks, only joining late last week. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Angus King (I-Maine) began talking with Republicans the first night of the shutdown, by Shaheen’s account. The core group of negotiators included Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Katie Britt (R-Ala.), among others.
Shaheen, asked about the RIF language, said that it was “something the White House put on the table weeks ago as something they were willing to take a look at.” Britt also said in an interview the idea was in the mix as she, Collins, Shaheen and others discussed possible paths to reopen the government.
Granting that a promise to follow the law for a few weeks is not a massive win in any normal sense, this has always struck me as the issue over which Democrats—and Congressional Republicans—should have been fighting for. Most admit that, while they of course wanted to extend the temporary Obamacare subsidy, that was always a pose. They were really animated by the Trump administration’s unprecedented power grabs: shuttering agencies without Congressional authorization, mass firings of probationary employees, pocket recisions of Congressionally-funded programs, and the like.
Fighting over the rule of law and Congress’ constitutional prerogatives would undoubtedly have been less sexy than healthcare subsidies for millions. But it was a fight they could have won, likely attracting some Republican support from the get-go, probably without inflicting the pain of a government shutdown.
