Yeah, nothing big, but when all you got is a pair of deuces, winning any pot is good.
I thought paying the TSA through executive order would let the House hold off forever, but I was wrong.
I was reading yesterday that other orgs in DHS were upset that TSA was getting paid and they weren’t. It sounded like the Pubs were going to try pushing it through reconciliation and skip the Dems.
It also highlights (to anyone with the intelligence that Og gave mayonnaise) that the shutdown was mainly, if not entirely, down to the GQP.
And Democrats get exactly what they asked for from the start, without conceding anything:
Everything gets funded but ICE/CBP. Well done, Democrats.
Congratulations, Democrats. Meanwhile Republicans are successfully destroying the Voting Rights Act. It ain’t easy feeling triumphant currently.
So they stopped wearing masks? Perplexity and Claude AI are telling me no. Is that incorrect?
Or it is that some Democrats asked for an end to masking for not all?
P.S. I do not mean to criticize the Democrats for failing to do the impossible. I’m just asking for the evidence that they got “exactly what they asked for”.
Democrats demanded that all of DHS be funded with the exception of ICE/CBP. That’s what they got. They’ve said they will support funding ICE/CBP if policies change (including masks). Republicans have so far refused. But their original demand was met. So this is a huge Democratic win that cost them nothing.
Yes, good work Democrats!
This is from the New York Times, March 25, 2026:
Such news stories gave me the impression that the goal was to actually make life better for at least some of the hard working long time immigrants being arrested by ICE. But I guess I misread. If I now understand correctly, the shutdown goal was to prevent the Democrats from sullying their reputation by voting for inhumane practices impossible to prevent so long as Trump is president. The Democrats won by forcing Republicans to use some combination of illegal expenditure of government funds, and the filibuster-proof reconciliation process.
So it’s a “huge win” in process terms, even though it does nothing to help innocent victims. Do I understand that correctly?
P.S. I am not criticizing congressional Democrats, whose base put them in a position where they had to put on a show of intransigence. I’m just trying to understand the huge win.
A couple of wins as I see it.
First, they didn’t cave. Often the Democrats have put up a stand on principle, but cave in because it’s often for the good of the nation which Republicans are flat out terrible at, even before Trump.
Second, though directly related to the first - it’s going to provide a success for Democrats to hammer on in the midterms. They didn’t cave, there are wins to be had, and this is a critical message as the Republican control of the Executive and SCOTUS keeps skirting (or outright breaking!) the law to hand their side whims.
Third, any win given point two above is a huge win, if only by comparison. They cannot make those two branches do anything because the SCOTUS won’t allow any checks on their power (see the refusal for any ethics concerns with teeth), Trump can veto, and being the current minority in the legislature, they can’t exert exact control.
I agree, getting some basic, commonsense and legal oversight of the gross negligence (at best mind you, often criminal conspiracy in fact) of the Border Patrol and ICE would be a better choice, but it was obvious that the Republican majority (egged on by Trump) were not going to budge.
So yeah, they exercised what power they could legally, stuck to their guns, and have emerged stronger (not strong given the expected MAGA fuckery) than they went into it. Getting an actual reform wouldn’t have likely worked, because, well, Trump would have said “You have the law, I choose not to enforce it”.
The huge win was they did the maximum possible with the power they had as the minority. There was literally nothing more they could get, with respect to better policy for ICE, as the minority, without Republican support.
The shutdown was a substantive loss for Democrats. At a time when the great majority of Americans tell pollsters immigration enforcement is going too far, the Democrats failed to do anything practical about it.
Sure, it’s a Democratic political win, since the Republicans are the ones who caused the Democrats to fail. But Republicans will successfully twist this to deflect attention from real, popular, Democratic goals like protecting the Dreamers, saying that the shutdown meant Democrats were trying to completely defund enforcement.
The only thing Democrats won is the right to say they persisted in an unwinnable fight. That feeds the narrative of both congressional parties sucking.
Then we’re going to have to disagree. Every Democrat or left-leaning-independent I associate with considered it at least a minor win, up to major. Again, as I said in my prior post and @iiandyiiii echoed, the Democrats are the minority party. They did what they could, with what they had.
If anything, there’s a large number of Democrats saying that caving on the issue would have been more to the narrative of “both congressional parties sucking” - granted they want a lot more but anyone looking at actual numbers knows better.
Of course, there’s the argument that Democrats should just go MAGA - promise the world with no legal way to deliver, but I’m not part of that philosopy.
Isn’t a political win by politicians just a “win”?
They’re the minority party. This is literally all they had the power to do by themselves.
I should have qualified it as a short-term political win. Long-term? We’ll see, but I’ve already given a reason why it may be a short-term win only.
Here is where I agree with you. We won’t know until after the midterms.
This is why the Democratic leadership had to do it. Their base wanted it.
No disagreement. Again, a lot of the most active Democrats are distressed with the political leaderships appeasement and deference to good government when MAGA doesn’t even qualify for “staying bought” level of political honesty.
And I also agree with you and @Atamasama - we have serious reason to doubt a free and clear election will be held for midterms, so true long-term planning is kind of out the window right now.
But delivering any kind of win is likely better for the base turning out than backing down again.
Yeah, they did good.
There was nothing they could do. They dont have the votes. The Republicans have a majority in both houses.
Right. It is simple math and a understanding of the Constitution.