The pointless government shutdown is over — but Schumer and Dems’ psychodrama only just getting started
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Our long national nightmare is over, but the Democratic psychodrama isn’t.
The longest shutdown in US history — with increasing pain points across the country, whether among travelers or SNAP recipients — is ending, while the Democratic recriminations are just getting started.
“It’s complete BS,” was a relatively mild take on the deal from one congressional progressive.
As a rule of thumb, government shutdowns are bootless exercises. They rarely work because the party that causes the shutdown, thinking that it will provide leverage, invariably gets blamed for the shutdown and then — surprise! — ends up in a worse position than where it began.
Democrats managed to escape the worst political fallout from their weeks-long refusal to fund the government. Otherwise, their tactic failed, and predictably so.
No Democratic senators have been seen wearing T-shirts saying, “I caused disruption and heartache for millions, and all I got was a meaningless promise for a lousy vote,” but they would be apt.
The shutdown was supposedly all about securing more Obamacare subsidies . This connection was entirely arbitrary, though. At the beginning of the shutdown, the Democrats spun the wheel and the bouncing ball landed on “health care.”
They just as easily could have picked immigration, climate, or LGBTQIA+ policy as the reason they wanted a shutdown. The advantage of health care is that it’s the one issue where Democrats still have a significant advantage.
They maintained it was it so imperative that Republicans extend forever Obamacare subsidies first passed in 2021 and then re-upped in 2022 under Joe Biden — without a single Republican vote either time — that it was worth shutting down the government over.
Republicans have sounded defensive about health care during the fight, but the Democratic demand was so extravagant, and the bad faith so obvious, that the GOP was never going to cave.
Sure enough, the GOP held firm, and as the shutdown began to bite, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reduced the ask to a one-year extension of the subsidies.
When that went nowhere, a band of relatively moderate Democratic senators broke ranks to support a deal for a mere Senate vote on continued subsidies. Not a guarantee of passage. Not even a promise of a vote in both houses of Congress. No, just a Senate vote on a Democratic priority that will probably fail.
No wonder progressives are livid, but when isn’t that the case? In the Trump years, to be progressive is to constantly feel an implacable sense of impotence and rage. This was the real reason for the shutdown — it was a readily available instrument for expressing an unreasoning hatred of Donald Trump.
Democrats believed that the moment, as Otter famously said in the movie “Animal House,” required a “stupid and futile gesture,” and acted accordingly.
On top of this, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer desperately wanted to appease the Democratic base. The aging New Yorker is so vulnerable to a potential primary challenge from progressive heartthrob Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that he must look to her now the way a wounded wildebeest does to a hungry lion.
Schumer had MSNBC viewers burning him in effigy earlier in the year when he refused to shut down the government. He didn’t want to make that mistake again, but the flaw in his plan was that it only meant delaying the inevitable.
Rather then infuriating their base by not shutting down the government, Democrats have infuriated their base by moving to re-open the government a few weeks after shutting it down. Progressives are still calling for Schumer’s head , even though he theoretically opposes the deal.
Most congressional Democrats surely realize that it would be unsustainable to continue to keep the government closed. Still, they aren’t going to let that get in the way of their public posturing. They are both glad that people on their side are willing to do the right thing by voting to fund the government, and glad that these other people—not them—are taking the fall for it.
Notably, presumptive 2028 presidential hopefuls Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg opposed the deal, knowing that maximal opposition to Trump is the price for entry in Democratic primary politics.
In short, the government shutdown may have been pointless and dumb, but there is much more where that came from.
Rich Lowry
Tags
Who is online
71 visitors
They demanded subsidies for their unafordable health care. And the media helped them escape blame for the shutdown.
Things are going to get a lot worse for them.
A complete farce from the beginning… it kept democrats mad and engaged through the election so it served its actual purpose.
This article and the first comment are just pro-Trump hoo ha. The shutdown isnt going to hurt the Democrats at all. Why? Because people see Trump's cruelty. He defied a court order to return food assistance to the poor, and wants to withhold back pay for the shutdown period to federal workers who called in sick as a way to pressure the government to end the it.
Americans know who caused it, the polling has been clear. In January or February this deal will be up and they will have to refund the government. By then Trump will be even more psychotic. If things dont improve the Democrats should do it again.
Because by November of next year nobody will remember it.
After the bad optics of Musk's chainsaw, PBS reminding everyone about funding cuts, round up/down bullshit because Trump can't afford pennies, and Trump changing the White House drapery with a bucket excavator it was inevitable that Republicans would be blamed for the shutdown. Republicans have gone full metal TEA Party which has never received broad public support. Republicans have not shot themselves in the foot. Republicans have shot their asses off and have been giving themselves a butt beating. That is what Trump chose to do. That is what Republicans chose to do. Republicans were not forced to adopt shithead politics.
No one should be surprised that Democrats' all-or-nothing, my-way-or-the-highway approach was a loser from the beginning. Democrats couldn't even force their own party to do anything with a no-compromise approach. Just ask Joe Biden about Democrat unity. The inevitable Democrat backbiting over 'caving' would naturally shift the blame for the shutdown onto Democratic Party leaders in Congress. Now it's the Schumer Shutdown and Democrats are pissed about it and need a scapegoat.
The end result is that government inflicted severe harm on the people of the United States and accomplished nothing. Big government does not need a room for its balls because there aren't any in government. Anywhere. Why isn't this validation for the grass-roots MAGA movement in the heartland? While the coastal elites shove pickles up their backsides to make relish, the heartland suffers yet again.
I guess then you shouldnt have voted for Trump. Without Trump and his authoritarian acts and his big beautiful bill there wouldnt have been a shutdown.
There was no alternative.
Democrats are not concerned with national sovereignty, Constitutional integrity, moral restraint, or American values, traditions, history, and heritage. Democrats have chosen to defend global priorities without regard for national priorities. Democrats are not an alternative.
Thus you believe that neither side is concerned with Constitutional integrity, moral restraint, or American values, traditions, history, and heritage. I hope you dont suffer depression as the result.
TEA Party has turned the Republican Party into anti-government crackpots. Democrats have turned their party over to anti-American globalists. Neither of the two parties are minding the store any longer. MAGA offered some hope but that has turned into just another betrayal.
The United States has become a wide open country that stands for nothing. There is nothing uniquely American about the United States any longer. If everyone has the freedom to do anything in the United States then nothing can be unacceptable. The United States can no longer control itself so cannot be a model for the world. The United States is nothing more than a pile of money and everyone around the world wants a piece of the action.
Oh, it's Trump's fault?
Then why are democrats so angry that the shutdown is coming to an end?