I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I’m annoyed that my health insurance premiums will double. (I’ve got the renewal information so this is factual, not hypothetical.) On the other hand I have a lot of important travel planned over the next month, so I need a functional air travel system.
The Dems might be able to pull off a political win with the following narrative.
It was important to try to get the healthcare subsidies as evidenced by the massive jump in prices which is now totally owned by the Republicans. But we didn’t think that they would be so ruthlessly evil as to starve children and cancel Thanksgiving purely out of spite. In the end the destruction threatened by the Republicans was too great to allow, and so as the one party who cares more for about the well being of their countrymen and women than political “wins” we had to relent.
That’s too many words and the Dems don’t have the discipline to make that narrative stick.
My immediate thought — or, rather, my second thought, after the usual “goddammit, Dems, you cowardly short-sighted morons” — is that there is an opportunity to extract a political win, of a different kind, out of this disastrously stupid capitulation. If they immediately go on a full-court media press, talking about how “Trump had no choice but to compromise with us because he’s weak and he’s feeling the heat,” they might be able to bait him into torpedoing the whole deal out of bloody-minded egotistical spite. And then they can hang the entire shutdown around his neck with no ambiguity.
But that would require the Dems to have, y’know, “strategy” and “vision” and “spine.” But, well, (gestures in wordless frustration at the Dems).
To keep people from starving as they lose SNAP benefits, and people in the government either work for free or get laid off. And all the other awful consequences of the government being shut down. It’s actually possible for politicians to care about what’s best for the people and not just what strengthens their grip on power.
I gotta ask: Is it really more important for the Dems to have a win than for people to get food? And I say that as a strong Democratic partisan.
It’s not their job. The Republicans are responsible for feeding people, not the Democrats.
The coward Kaine is my Senator as well, and I will be supporting his primary opponent at his next election.
Fuck the cowards who supported this bullshit deal. I was working with no pay, and in favor of continuing to fight, because this administration continues to break the law by refusing to spend congressionally appropriated money. And will continue to do so, because a few cowards in the senate gave up the fight.
Democrats were winning this fight - the election last week proved it. Politics is about public opinion and they were winning. And a few of them surrendered, getting nothing in return.
The problem with most Democratic politicians - like most all politicians - is that they’re too rich to feel how brutal things are financially for the average commonfolk. ACA is a crushing burden without the subsidies. But the average fat-cat millionaire (D) senator isn’t feeling the pinch.
You are thinking about this in old-fashioned political terms. In any scenario where power is sloshing back and forth within the boundaries of normal governance, wins are transitory, a means for achieving policy goals. This is not that scenario. The Republicans are cultural terrorists with a gun to the head of the country. A win in this scenario is not about temporarily accruing power and momentum in pursuit of some incremental achievement. America is fighting for its very future and wins are defined by any possible means of obstructing the enemies of freedom and whittling away at their entrenched authority. This is a war for the soul of democracy, not a squabble over fractions of a tax deduction.
Edit to add: And yes, it’s true that the Dems are far from the ideal opposition force to depend on in such a scenario. They’re weak, they’re compromised, they’re lacking in vision and courage, etc etc. And there’s no guarantee that, if restored to power, the Dems will have the strength or desire to start repairing the damage (and ample evidence to the contrary). But for the moment at least, they’re all the country has. If they are allowed to continue as they have been, then the battle is already lost and hope is futile. If you don’t want to surrender to the apparently inevitable, then the Dems must be empowered, at least in the short term. Otherwise you can all pack it in.
As a non American I might have this totally wrong, let me know if I am.
As I understand it the 60% majority was originally but in to force the Democrats and Republicans to work together to seek concensus (unless one was so popular thay had 60% of the seats).
Even before Trump the parties were getting more and more polarised but with Trump it has gone ot extreme levels, any republican who dares to suggest any sort of compromise with the Democrats is signing their own deart warrent (at least politically) and what Trump wants is far more extreme that previous Republican policy.
I believe the Republicans want the super majority to be removed so 51 votes in the senate is enough to pass the budget, what would be required for that?
There are 4 realities that I see here
- There are many federal employees with their lives turned upside down who can’t even put food on the table. Nobody has any right to ask them to starve forever just to advance their political goals, especially people who aren’t making any short-term sacrifice at all.
- Fox news owns the information environment. It’s risky to rely on branding this the “Trump shutdown” forever, especially as we go into the Thanksgiving travel season. Remember that you’re talking about a media-consuming public who blames Biden for the summer of 2020, when Trump was in charge. The “Trump Shutdown” could easily turn into the “Schumer (Airport) Snarl” or whatever. Public opinion is incredibly fickle.
- If it’s true that the ruling party owns everything, then they also own their inevitable backsliding on the “promise of a vote”, and they own healthcare premium spikes going into the midterms. A clean & clear Dem victory in the midterms means everything.
- I believe that there’s no higher political purpose right now than making sure all the shit sticks to Trump and Republicans so they can be chased out of power, be prosecuted, and never hold office again. Everything has to be aligned to that goal.
I know that political decisions of this scale involve tradeoffs with many aspects that weigh the possibility of harm, benefit, and prospects of the party gaining power so they can do more than beg the next time around. I also know that we don’t have all the information about what tradeoffs went into this.
So I can see the contours of why a deal may have been necessary. We haven’t even seen how this plays out in the House. I don’t know with certainty if this turns out to be the best choice in the long run, but I think anyone who believes they know is certainly fooling themselves.
The history of the filibuster is complex, but essentially it was adopted so that nothing could be passed unless it was really, really popular (like 3/5ths popular). All Senators like to avoid being the deciding vote on a narrowly popular measure when they’re in the majority. No Senators like losing all their power just by being in the minority. If they ensure that they can cut even small deals when they aren’t in power, then they can hold their jobs forever. And that’s exactly what they do.
If it helps clarify things, the filibuster first gained widespread adoption as a tool to preserve racial segregation and discrimination laws. Nationwide, civil rights clearly had the support of a modest majority. So racial segregationists obviously had incentive to raise the vote threshold to a safe 60% margin. There were also some Senators who didn’t want to be the deciding vote even though their constituents may have supported it.
The Senate is an anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian body, is the essence of it.
No Senator really wants to get rid of the filibuster, especially Republicans who know that eventually they risk being a permanent minority. Last week Trump was agitating for the end of the filibuster, even though Republicans didn’t want it, because Trump wanted the shutdown to end, and he cares nothing about his party, and he can’t see more than 2 weeks into the future anyway.
I think any democrat that was willing to cave even when polling was in their favor would’ve been better served to never filibuster the budget in the first place.
I don’t blame Schumer much for this - he was clearly skeptical of filibustering the budget going back to the spring. Overwhelming pressure from the base led him to back a filibuster this time. You can (rightly) accuse him of not believing in anything but you can’t accuse him of not knowing his caucus.
The problem, I guess, is that Republicans don’t care at all that Americans are in pain. The president inflicted additional pain (by holding back food stamps, and when forced to pay, only paid part). It’s tough to negotiate when only one side actually cares about the country.
Even if the Senate Republicans follow through with some show of a vote about the subsidies, the House Republicans are under no obligation to do the same, so those are dead.
As I said somewhere, if what’s in the Epstein files is bad enough to get Prince Andrew kicked out of the Royal family, then it has to be catastrophically damning to trump.
Sure, the Dems suck at messaging. But this shouldn’t even be a hard one. Waiting to see how they drop this easy one.
Durbin is one of my senators. Up til now, I’ve never known a significant policy decision on which his stance differed from mine. That gives me modest hope that this may have been a good choice. We’ll see what is done - and what message is sent - in upcoming weeks.
The primary messaging advantage the dems had up to this point was that people expect the republicans to be willing to take Solomons wager. Now that the democrats caved people aren’t going to take them seriously that they believed a promise from the party they thought would split the baby in the first place.
I still think ultimately most swing voters dont get into th nitty gritty at all and will simply blame the party in charge for their premiums going up, but i dont think this will reach many voters outside of that. Mostly a waste.
I have mixed feelings about this “compromise” or “cave”, depending on how you look at it.
The Democratic Senators did get some, minor, concessions. They can legitimately say “we tried to get the GOP to increase the subsidies but all they would do is promise a vote” along with “we just had to get the government back open again”. And there were a few RIF rollbacks and some year-long appropriations added.
The headline is “Centrist Democrats compromise with GOP to reopen the government”. That’s not a terrible message heading into midterms, honestly, especially with the ACA vote coming up and another round of this in January 1. When those health-care premium increases hit Democratic candidate can correctly say “see, this is why we shut down the government - to fix this”.
The GOP House is still going to be very hard to get in line. I wouldn’t be completely shocked if Johnson can’t get this deal over the line, but perhaps enough Democrats in the House will cross over to make it work over GOP objections.
I thought this whole thing was a very slight political advantage for Democrats, with very real costs to real people (some in this thread). How long it is worth it to press a political advantage knowing it has some real-world costs is going to be different for each Senator. I think the specter of massive air disruptions and SNAP clawbacks was enough to change that calculus for enough Democratic Senators.
First of all, we are likely premature, as we don’t know what - if anything - the House is going to do.
To me it looks like the Dems got some minor concessions, which they should proclaim as a win (whether or not any of us sees it that way.) They would now have a 2.5 month window, during which they can proclaim the need to address ACA - or any other issues. At the beginning of this shutdown, the demand to continue ACA subsidies seemed to come out of nowhere. That cannot be said now. If no vote is held (despite promises), and nothing else is done before 1/31/26, it will be easier to tie this to the Repubs. With midterm primaries right ahead.
The only folk to lose will be ACA recipients. Hope you don’t get sick the next couple of months…. Of course, they woulda been fucked if the Dems caved BEFORE the shutdown. Now, at least their situation was widely publicized, and can continue to be publicized for the next 2.5 months. (Unfortunately, I expect both sides to drop it until acting surprised the last week of January that nothing was done.) 
And workers who were furloughed this time around have 2.5 months to consider whether they might want to reconsider their employment options.
If nothing else, the focus of the electorate is now on the expiring ACA subsidies. Without the shutdown drama, most people wouldn’t wake up to that until they received their first inflated premium bill and even then most would be unclear about why their insurance went up.
ETA: Ninja’d by one minute.