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Coming out of Tuesday’s election blowout, the Democrats were riding high and unified. They won big in places like New Jersey that were supposed to be close. Republicans were taking increasing blame for the government shutdown, now in its sixth week. The Republicans were fracturing, with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) wanting a deal and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) stonewalling. And Trump’s rants made him increasingly irrelevant.
Less than a week later, it is Democrats who have given it all away, and Democrats who are fractured.
As I reported Saturday, the cave-in began at Thursday’s Senate Democratic caucus meeting. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer had been publicly insisting that any deal to continue Trump’s current budget had to add continued subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. But privately, Schumer was encouraging a centrist Gang of Eight to keep negotiating with Republicans and settle for a lot less.
On Friday, Schumer announced his latest plan: a deal to reopen the government in exchange for a one-year extension of the ACA subsidies. Predictably, that was dead on arrival.
Meanwhile, the eight centrists, with Schumer’s backing, were negotiating their own deal. Their leaders were Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
On Sunday night, their deal passed the Senate, 60-40, with eight Democrats voting with the Republicans. (The other four were John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Dick Durbin of Illinois.) Schumer voted against it, in the hope that his vote would conceal his fingerprints. He fooled no one. The man’s cynicism knows no bounds.
The deal includes a continuing resolution to reopen all of government through January, and some of it for the entire fiscal year. The measure also provides for a separate vote in December on ACA subsidies, which is meaningless because the Republicans will vote it down. The heart of the deal is the three appropriations bills that include a few sweeteners, including a provision to reverse layoffs of federal workers made during the shutdown, and to provide immediate back pay for those who had been working without pay.
Those measures were enough to bring along Kaine, who represents many federal workers, as a crucial eighth vote in favor of the deal. But his Virginia colleague, Mark Warner, who is up for re-election next year, withheld his support. And there is nothing in the deal that prevents Trump from continuing to impound duly appropriated funds in much of the government.
Other Senate Democrats have vowed to keep fighting. One tactic: They plan to refuse to yield back the balance of their debate time, a kind of mini-filibuster that could delay final passage for several days.
Here’s the worst part. Any hope on the part of Schumer and the centrist Democrats getting credit for reopening the government is now swamped by the political story of Republicans dividing Democrats and reopening the government on Republican terms. |
