Open Wide

Senate Democrats agree to shut down the shutdown.

I don’t really have much in the way of insight or words of wisdom regarding the Senate deal to fund the government through the holidays. Generally speaking, I dislike the government being shut down—an awful lot of households depend, one way or another, on federal government checks to pay their bills, or federal government services to ease their burdens. (That includes the service of helping you fly without crashing into another plane.) It’s genuinely bad for a lot of people when the government is shut down. But, sometimes holding out for critical concessions is even more important.

It would be nice if we had some sort of functioning legislative branch of government, not to mention a minimally responsive executive branch, to work through things such as funding the United States government. Maybe someday.

Meanwhile, as I write this Sunday evening, a group of Senate Democrats has voted with almost all the chamber’s Republicans to move forward with a Continuing Resolution through January, that provides some concessions but not nearly enough for most on the left. Crucially, extension of the ACA subsidies is not part of the deal—only an agreement for the Senate to hold a vote on an extension next month. Presumably the hope is either to shame Republicans into voting yes, or embarrass them with their votes against.

At the start of the shutdown drama, it was widely believed (maybe correctly, maybe not) that the ACA fix was the one true demand of Democrats in Congress—that everything else on their list could be traded away for that. The House Republican strategy, presumably directed by the White House, was to pass a clean CR and then run away, remaining hidden in some cavern to force the Senate into a take-it-or-leave-it binary choice on the CR. They didn’t get that in the end; when the Senate gets through its procedural steeplechase later this week, Speaker Mike Johnson’s gnomes will have to lure the hidden House GOP conference back up into the light, and onto whatever aircraft remains functional, to bring them to the Capitol for its first vote in many weeks.

That could bring its own drama. Democratic House leadership has immediately denounced the Senate deal, so it’s unclear how many crossover votes this deal will muster. Meanwhile there’s no guarantee that Republican hardliners in the House will all agree to give it their stamp of approval. It sounds to me as though the White House is on board, which means Johnson will be, but many of us retain a belief that, despite his surprising success holding the conference together so far, his humiliating failure lies just around some soon-approaching corner.

As for Democrats, recriminations and open warfare now seem likely. So much for the brief moment of party jubilation following Tuesday’s electoral results. Democrats are just no good at felicity, it was only a matter of time before woe betided them.

One problem preventing the Democrats from holding together—and this hardly constitutes a thorough analysis—is that there is strong evidence that the White House doesn’t care about being unpopular. I wrote about this here recently: it’s a version of lame duck Presidency, compounded by an indifference to the President’s party and, of course, to human suffering. Trump himself seems interested almost exclusively in what he considers “legacy” projects; and others with power in the West Wing seem determined to effectuate their version of the conservative project in toto before the likely midterm loss of congressional control. Being blamed for households suffering catastrophic premium increases doesn’t faze them. For God’s sake, they just petitioned the Supreme Court to stop hungry children from being fed. These are not people who are going to give in just because they are ”losing” the shutdown public relations contest. These are people who, presented with the fate of Tim Cratchit, would no doubt haul the Ghost of Christmas Present off to a detention center for obstruction. “If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population,” Scrooge famously said. In a modern retelling I imagine he would suggest his clerk purchase Tiny Tim new crutches with a Health Savings Account.

I suspect that a number of Democratic U.S. Senators—not just the ones willing to cast the Yea votes necessary to reach the magic 60 Sunday night—concluded a while ago that no public shame or political cost was likely to move the White House to extend the ACA subsidies, which in turn meant there would be no luring House Republicans from their dank grottoes, and thus no end to this shutdown as the pain piled higher. That doesn’t mean they were right to strike this deal, or that House Democrats should abet its consummation. Just that there are no good deals when bargaining with Scrooge without apparitional assistance.