There’s too much DOOM. Don’t buy into the fascist line that it’s always the Democrats’ fault.
Democrats did well at the polls last week. This compromise consolidates that. We don’t have to have total victory to win, and sunk costs don’t justify continuing the same course of action.
Here is what we’ve got:
Republicans in the House are going to be forced to compromise by approving the Senate bill.
Republicans are now very visibly the ones in control of rising healthcare costs.
Healthcare funding is going to come up again next year, and Republicans won’t be able to punish government workers or the hungry.
Healthcare is now the issue for the 2026 campaign.
A reprieve of the current battle is not surrender, and the Republicans have ceded any tactical advantage they once had.
Y’know… we’ve seen how the R-led House has worked the past almost 3 years. What if Johnson’s insistence on not reconvening until after the Clean CR passes as-is were NOT about Grijalva’s signature on the Files issue, but about knowing he has breakaways in his own conference and would be unable to pass anything w/o the Dems?
Every Dem Senator that voted against the capitulation in March, and the capitulation today, has done more to fight immediate fascism and tyranny than Durbin. Durbin’s own state is under continuous brutalization by federal thugs and Durbin goes out of his way to compromise with some of the most brazen and dishonest of those thugs’ enablers (i.e. Republican leadership in the Senate), rather than continue a fight that those enablers, and Trump himself, were losing, politically speaking. And that’s the whole issue there – their job is politics. They were winning a political battle (this shutdown) against fascists and their enablers. And Durbin and a few others gave up on that fight that they were winning, with pretty much zip in return. Certainly nothing in return that helps in that fight.
YMMV, but I don’t believe that they were winning that fight. Trump and the GOP were progressively turning up the heat to get capitulation: withholding SNAP benefits, shutting down air travel, as well as Federal employees being furloughed and not getting paid. The longer that the Democrats held out, the more that the GOP was going to be able to pin the pain on them.
Any senator knows more about political strategy than I do.
Perhaps the tide of public blame was at a point where it might have turned, and this drove the decision.
I’m reminded of what I first heard WRT Viet Nam, advising the US to simply return home and claim it had won.
MAYBE continuing this game of chicken MIGHT have resulted in something - tho no one knows exactly what. The fucking Repubs have proven themselves to be completely devoid of any social conscience.
This way, there is a clear deadline within which the Repubs can come up with some solution.
Supposedly, Johnson is instructing Congresscritters to return to DC immediately. No idea what they’ve been doing that would require 36-hrs notice…
If you’re not sure about the polls, we just had a friggin’ election in several states, with Democrats winning big everywhere (including statewide in Georgia)! Jesus. What other evidence would it take?
It bugs the shit out of me that so many Democrats are constantly second-guessing themselves. We were winning! There’s not a shred of evidence we were losing, except that a handful of idiots in the Senate (note that not any of them are up for re-election next year) thought it was time to surrender!
We just empowered Republicans and Trump to do the exact same thing next time. You think they won’t use the exact same tactics considering that they worked? The way to win would be to force the actual party in power to find a solution. Not to give up and prove that the pain is the right strategy for the bad guys.
I’m not talking about the broader environment; I’m talking specifically about Senate Democrats trying to force the GOP to negotiate in order to end the shutdown. They were getting zero traction on that, and I saw no evidence that that was going to change any time soon. If anything, the GOP started playing hardball in recent days, maybe in response to the election results.
I don’t think that they intended it as a bluff; I do think that they underestimated the GOP’s stubbornness, and that they overestimated their own hand.
Exactly. This is hardball. The GOP is willing to do anything, because they’re largely terrible people. If we’re not willing to force the GOP to actually make hard decisions where they might actually care (like having to deal with holiday air travel!), then what’s the point in fighting? If we had kept it up, we might have forced an end to the filibuster – which would be just a massive long-term victory for America (and the Democrats in particular), even if in the very short term it would help Trump. Or we might have actually forced Republicans to (god forbid!) negotiate with the minority party.
This appears to be the fundamental thing the democratic senators didn’t agree on. And again given that they weren’t really ok with the gop changing the filibuster I don’t know what else they were hoping to get out of this.
I don’t know how to describe this other than as a bluff. If you aren’t bluffing you’re willing to keep at it even if the other side is intransient.
Bullshit. They had leverage until they surrendered. The holiday travels are starting. All stop on domestic air travel would have massively hurt Republicans in office.
And I think that, and things like it, are as big a part of the explanation for the surrender as anything else - the old guard of the Democratic party, like Durbin, is still largely corporate friendly and corporate funded. And those corporations aren’t going to tolerate anything that causes big economic pain, even if it’s in the cause of fighting immediate fascism and tyranny.
Here’s another reason to blame the Dems on this. Historically it has always been the Pubs threatening or actually voting to shutdown the government. Knowing that history, here the Dems are “let me do it for you.” They should have know that no matter what the public thought that the Pubs would never concede to allow the government to reopen. A one day shutdown to protest the ending of ACA subsidies? That would have worked. Not more than a month.
I strongly believe that the Democrats were losing the messaging battle on things like that; the longer they held out, the more that Trump and his cronies could point to them, and them alone, as the ones keeping the government shut down.
YMMV, clearly. It sounds like you believe that the Democrats would have won this fight if they just held out longer. I disagree; they are dealing with an opposing party which has clearly decided that negotiation and compromise is simply not an option.
Edit: I also think that last week’s election results were more of a referendum on the economy and Trump-inflicted chaos than they were about the shutdown, specifically. Again, YMMV.
Sometimes ChatGPT is dissappointing me, but I decided to try again with this prompt:
ChatGPT came back with 3.9 percent. Sounds like statistical significance! So, unless someone here shows me that ChapGPT messed up again, I’m going to say that the threat of being primaried next year reduces the chance of senators doing what they, in their heart, think they should do – which is, in this case – save the filibuster.
Framing this as mostly being about the filibuster takes away the losers and winners narrative of Democratic Party heroes, weaklings, dummies and fighters. I do not blame senators for paying attention to the election calendar. If they get successfully primaried by strong progressives, at least some of them risk losing the seat to a Trumper.
I do not blame the gang of eight for disagreeing with me on the filibuster. While I want to get rid of it, in the short term, it would hand MAGA a series of victories.
