WaPo (“Senate takes key vote toward ending government shutdown“):
A key group of Senate Democrats joined Republicans on Sunday night to advance an agreement to end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
After bipartisan negotiators struck a deal during a rare weekend session, seven Democratic senators and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) voted with almost all of the chamber’s Republicans to take the first step toward reopening the government. Sunday’s vote, which needed 60 votes to pass, is the first of many that will be necessary to pass the agreement in the upper chamber.
[…]
The bipartisan compromise combines three full-year funding measures into one package with a stopgap funding bill that would reopen the government through Jan. 30.
But the deal would not extend Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, which Democrats have warned will cause health insurance premiums to skyrocket for millions of Americans.
Instead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) committed to holding a separate vote on legislation to extend the subsidies by the second week of December, after the government reopens.
So, the federal government has been shut down for a month and a half, hundreds of thousands of civil servants have been working without pay, SNAP benefits have been cut off, and untold Americans have had to cancel trips at the last minute in a standoff over extending ACA subsidies. And Democrats extracted a promise that the Senate will vote on ACA subsidies in a few weeks? A promise that was on the table pretty much from the outset?
At HuffPo, Igor Bobic and Jennifer Bendery (“Senate Reaches Deal To Reopen Government After Moderate Democrats Cave“) offer a reasonable assessment:
For weeks, Democrats have been insisting that any vote to reopen the government also be tied to a vote to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits expiring at the end of the year, something they repeatedly called a “health care crisis.” Millions of people rely on these subsidies to afford health care, and since ACA open enrollment began on Nov. 1, many have already seen the costs of their health care skyrocket.
The deal that moderate Democrats cut with Republicans doesn’t extend those health care subsidies, but sets up a future vote to extend them – a vote that will almost certainly fail, as Republicans have no interest in doing this.
Proponents of the deal argue it’s still a win for them, as Republicans previously weren’t willing to hold any votes on restoring ACA subsidies.
“This deal guarantees a vote to extend Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, which Republicans weren’t willing to do,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a liberal Democrat who supported the deal primarily because it includes protections for federal workers, many of whom live in his state. “Lawmakers know their constituents expect them to vote for it, and if they don’t, they could very well be replaced at the ballot box by someone who will.”
But Republicans did offer Democrats a vote on the ACA subsidies weeks earlier, in mid-October, and Democrats simply refused to cave to their demands.
The reality is that moderate Democrats in particular were looking for an off-ramp from the shutdown, as the expiration of federal food assistance for tens of millions of people, and the compounding travel nightmare at airports across the country, increasingly weighed on them.
There was also a sense among some that Democrats couldn’t win the fight in the long term. Over the weekend, Trump was digging in more by urging Republicans to repeal the ACA subsidies entirely. He’s also pushed GOP senators to go so far as to eliminate the filibuster to get what he wants.
“The question was, as the shutdown progresses, is a solution on the ACA becoming any more likely? It appears not,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told HuffPost after a two-hour closed-door meeting with Democrats on Sunday.
“I think people are saying we’re not going to get what we want, although we still have a chance, because part of the deal is a vote on the ACA subsidies,” King said. “But in the meantime, a lot of people are being hurt.”
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Their agreement includes a reversal of all the firings of federal workers that have taken place since the shutdown began, as well as protections against more firings happening again – until January 30, 2026. And it funds federal food assistance at a higher level than before.
But progressive lawmakers and groups are fuming about this deal, with some calling it a “betrayal” to the millions of Americans about to be priced out of their health care coverage.
Not surprisingly, most are not pleased. Back to the WaPo report:
[T]he deal split the party. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) came out against it.
“This health care crisis is so severe, so urgent, so devastating for families back home that I cannot in good faith support this CR,” Schumer said on the Senate floor, referring to the bill, known as a continuing resolution.
Most rank-and-file Democrats also opposed the deal.
“I think it’s a terrible mistake,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) told reporters as she left a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats that lasted more than two hours Sunday evening. “The American people want us to stand and fight for health care, and that’s what I believe we should do.”
The Atlantic‘s Jonathan Chait (“Senate Democrats Just Made a Huge Mistake“) agrees:
The conventional wisdom about government shutdowns is that they always fail. Senate Democrats probably assumed as much when they shut down the government. Perhaps they thought they were giving partisan activists something to root for, even fleetingly, before eventually caving.
That was a reasonable, if somewhat cynical, calculation. The odd thing is that the shutdown was actually working for Democrats, but in a way that some Democratic senators did not fully internalize, and which makes their ultimate capitulation tonight much harder to understand.
The reason shutdowns always fail is that the public eventually turns against the party responsible, applying more and more heat until its most vulnerable members feel compelled to give in. Presidents have little reason to give concessions to end shutdowns, because the bulk of the political pain is typically felt by their congressional adversaries.
That did not happen this time. Polls found that the public narrowly but consistently placed the blame on Donald Trump and his allies, not congressional Democrats.
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What’s more, Democrats’ goal during the shutdown was to draw more public attention to health care, one of their strongest issues, and one where Republicans are engineering a social catastrophe. Democrats are demanding an extension of tax credits for people purchasing health insurance on the individual market. That is an issue where they command massive public support.
Republicans were unlikely ever to give in on the tax credits, because their ideological opposition to universal health care is so overwhelming that they would rather suffer defeat than surrender. But that is just the thing: They were taking the hit. Democrats succeeded in drawing news coverage to health care, and even baited Republicans into floating more of their toxic and radical ideas for changing the system.
The likeliest way out of the impasse wasn’t that Republicans would make concessions on Obamacare, but rather, that they would decide to end the filibuster, changing Senate rules to block minority parties from shutting down the government. Trump has demanded Republican senators do this, and his ask is completely reasonable. It makes no sense for Congress to require a supermajority vote merely to allow the government to stay open.
This outcome would ultimately have been a win for Democrats. The Senate would get fairer and more reasonable rules. Democrats would not find themselves in the unfair position of being asked to supply votes for a government-spending deal Trump feels free to violate at will. And the next time Democrats get full control of government but fewer than 60 Senate votes, they would have an easier time passing their own agenda.
[…]
Democrats could have held the line on the shutdown, and spent weeks watching Trump’s approval ratings fall while war breaks out between the pro-filibuster Republican senators and the president and his loyalists. This would have produced a better and more democratic ultimate outcome.
The degree to which playing with millions of people’s livelihoods is a fucking game to people in Washington never ceases to amaze me. All that matters is who gets the blame!
Holding out would have caused serious pain in the short run. “I think people were saying ‘We’re not going to get what we want,’ although we still have a chance,” Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, said. “But in the meantime, a lot of people are being hurt.” If you truly believe that Trump poses an existential threat to the republic, however, this is the kind of ruthless maneuver you would undertake. Trump has already caused, and will continue causing, horrific outcomes for vulnerable Americans.
I mean, all the pain it caused millions of people would have all been worth it!
Ultimately, Democrats fought and lost. The Trump administration figured out how to minimize the pain of the shutdown for its own supporters early on by shifting funds to keep paying military personnel and federal law enforcement. And refused to do the same for SNAP recipients when existing funds dried up. That, and leveraging the crisis at airports caused by unpaid TSA agents and, especially, air traffic controllers calling out sick to order flights canceled upped the pressure.
There was no end in sight. There are enough institutionalists left in the Senate that totally ending the filibuster was just out of the question. Having the shutdown extend into Thanksgiving would have been devastating for all concerned.
Regardless, Chait’s conventional wisdom turned out to be right. Nobody won this shutdown. But a whole lot of people lost.
