Open Wide : Senate Democrats agree to shut down the shutdown.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
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.
Tags
Who is online
127 visitors
Anyone could have predicted that Trump and Johnson and Thune dont care about the American people. We now are told Trump will have a plan for Americans health care, which has been in the works for over ten years .
When they take a vote next month on the ACA subsidies, and the Republicans vote it down, the Democrats will have ammunition for 2026. All they need are people who can carry the case, which leaves out most of current Democratic leadership.
One question: we were told the affordable care act would make health care affordable. So why does it need to be subsidized? Why is health care in such a mess?
Why has it taken Trump ten years and counting to come up with a "plan" ?
The truth is he doesnt give a shit if Americans have health care. He would just as soon people concentrate on how great the new Trump Ballroom will be.
In 2016 Trump said his health care plan (to replace Obamacare) would be released "soon". How gullible can people be?
Why is health care in such a mess?
Because in the US it is married to capitalism. Which would you prefer: your money or your life?
Trump had a pan in which people would be allotted some money in a personal health account which they would use as they thought best. It is really irrelevent since we got Obama's plan, which was never affordable and needed the Supreme Court to fix its legality.
The reason for the shutdown by democrats wasn't simply subsidies for the ACA, it is specifically about extending an emergency subsidy granted during covid which was supposed to end by agreement of democrats. If we can't even end an emegency subsidy that was supposed to end, we aren't much different than Cuba.
Repeal & Replace was defeated by one spiteful little man.
You mean was married to Capitalism. Those were the days when parents told their children to work hard and set money aside for health insurance and retirement. Back then we had very fine doctors who made house calls and emergency rooms that weren't overwhelmed.
Replace with what? Trump campaigned in 2016 on having a plan to fix healthcare. He's still lying about it ten years later.
Damn, lets go back to the days when people didnt live as long .
What a joke these people are.
Why didn't democrats fix Obamacare. Better still, why not just get rid of it?
They screw things up, demand to borrow more and more money from our grandchildren to aggravate the problem even more and then whine that republicans won’t fix it. Childish behavior.
Throwing money at a problem is easier than admitting their fix (ACA) sucked.
It was a poor idea that wasn't going to fix any of the structural problems in the ACA or the American healthcare system.
Why do banks, billionaires and farms?
Just watched the Daily Show and Jon Stewart's take on it was that a few Democrats just screwed the pooch bigly by caving in.
Yup, and every one of them conveniently isn't up for re-election next year. This is so they can take the heat for the others who are up for re-election who can proclaim loudly next year how they stood strong and never caved.
www.mediaite.com /media/news/left-leaning-senator-flat-out-tells-scarborough-standing-up-to-donald-trump-didnt-work/
Left-Leaning Senator Flat-Out Tells Scarborough: ‘Standing Up to Donald Trump Didn’t Work’
Joe DePaolo 3-4 minutes 11/10/2025
A left-leaning senator has drawn a conclusion from the shutdown, which is certain to infuriate many progressives — standing up to President Donald Trump doesn’t work.
In an interview on Morning Joe Monday, Sen. Angus King (I-ME) — who caucuses with the Democrats — explained his vote to help end the government shutdown .
“Why did you decide to vote with Republicans to open the government?” Scarborough said.
“Well, Joe, you have to go back to what the strategy was at the beginning of the shutdown,” King said. “There were two goals, both of which I support. One was standing up to Donald Trump. The other was getting some resolution on the ACA premium tax credit issue. The problem was, the shutdown wasn’t accomplishing either goal. And there was practically, well, it was zero likelihood that it was going to.”
King went on to argue that a shut-down government only made the executive branch stronger.
“In terms of standing up to Donald Trump, the shutdown actually gave him more power,” King said. “Exhibit A being what he’s done with SNAP and SNAP benefits across the country. Oh, by the way, Joe, you’re gonna love this: Guess who’s getting paid during the shutdown? Not the park rangers or air traffic controllers. The ICE agents. Under special law, under that big awful bill that they passed last summer, the ICE agents are being paid. Nobody else is.
“So standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work. It actually gave him more power.”
Scarborough pressed King on whether last week’s election results in several states — in which Democrats won several key victories by bigger-than-expected margins — should have an impact on the Democrats’ strategy in the shutdown talks.
“But even Donald Trump admitted that the government shutdown is what caused Democrats to win the election in historic fashion last week,” Scarborough said.
“At some point, there’s diminishing returns,” King said. “And as I say, the strategy was ‘let’s bring the Republicans to the table.’ It didn’t happen. It wasn’t going to happen. And in the meantime, if this was just a dispute between politicians in the Senate and whether we had to hang around for the weekend, that would be one thing. But Joe, there is tremendous collateral damage from this. Forty-two million Americans’ SNAP benefits are at risk, and are being lost. People aren’t being paid for the work that they’re doing. I don’t want to land at an airport in the United States with a sleepy air traffic controller because they’re working double shifts. … if the strategy isn’t working, you change tactics. And particularly, you change tactics if your own troops are at risk, and that’s really what’s happening here. There was collateral damage to the American people at the same time the goal wasn’t being achieved.”
Watch above, via MSNBC .
Trump is a psychopath sociopath, so there is no surprise that he refused to lead the GOP to compromise.
Democrats have always demanded a clear CR to reopen the government in these situations. Trump compromised from the first and gave them what they’ve always wanted instead of using the shutdown for partisan purposes like the democrats.
and the broken brained media blamed trump,,,
Hard to spin the guys that voted to to shut the government down were not responsible for shutting the government down. But the dems gave it their best shot and decided that having 8 give up and the rest keeping the lie up will work for them in the midterms. It is all about power, not what is good for Americans
I agree with Senator King. Mr G has been furloughed since Oct 1. It's time for him to get back to work. Tho he has been going in for a few hours every day. Even tho he's not getting paid
Trump is more than willing to let people suffer as hostages to his kingly dreams, and that is the reason he cant be held to account with an appeal to decency. The Democrats need to take a different approach.
The same can be said for several members of Congress as well.
Yup. It's impossible to play chicken with a psycopath like Donald Trump. I think Democrats were hoping that if they stood their ground long enough some Republicans might cave regardless of what Trump was telling them to do. But I think they realized that Republicans are completely 100% controlled by Trump which means he has zero oversight and the conservatives on the SCOTUS basically gave him unlimited executive power.
Someone on Fox News today mentioned how Trump had 'dictated' the Republican response and the Republicans held true. So, the branch of the government in charge of keeping the executive in check is having their moves 'dictated' to them by the executive. We are, already, effectively living under a dictator with no check on his power who is currently running his own witch hunt investigations into anyone who has dared challenged his rise to power over the last decade, even former Presidents. This is all to consolidate power in an attempt to become the American Putin, enriching himself and his friends, absolute power, arresting and imprisoning dissenters, assassinating political foes, and zero oversight because a large group of white conservative bigoted Russians longing for their old glory days of the cold war support him.
I truly hope our nation, our people and our system of government functions the way it is supposed to when faced with a vile piece of trash like Trump and the historians are allowed to write an accurate accounting of all of Trump's actions, warts and all, much like we eventually got with Nixon. Lay bare all his misdeeds so our children and grandchildren can study who not to emulate. Trump will become the butt of thousands of jokes for the next half century at least. He will be laughed at and shamed, his name dragged through the mud along with names like Benedict Arnold, John Wilkes Booth, Richard Nixon, Nathan Bedford Forrest or Joe McCarthy. It will be impolite to spit in the street any other time, but when Trump's name is heard even grandmothers will spit the distaste out of their mouths. That will be Trumps eventual legacy regardless of how many mindless sycophants prostrate themselves before him.
Lol. This is insane. A bipartisan majority has been willing to fund the government since day one and were prevented by extremely partisan democrats who held the country hostage using a provision they voted to end as their excuse for doing so.
It just amazes me that people who call Republicans terrorist and hostage takers for trying to force policy changes during shutdowns now blame Trump for this. Who do you think you are fooling? No Democrat can, deep down, actually think Trump is to blame for this, right? Please tell me it's all a show.....
Jim Clyburn, who democrats revere, was on CNN today arguing that a district Judge can tell the president to spend money congress hasn't appropriated...
It's really amazing to watch democrats bitch about trump being a dictator. Total lack of self awareness.
If the ACA was affordable, why does it need subsidies?
No, the question is why ACA needed expanded subsidies? We all know that the original premium subsidies were necessary to make the program work. But ACA was limited to 11 million who really needed it; that's an acceptable cost to the public.
But why the expanded subsidies? The expanded subsidies increased enrollment to 24 million and nearly tripled the cost of ACA. The expanded premium subsidies created a threshold where a family of four with an income of more than $130,000 needed public assistance. The expanded premium subsidies created a regressive program where the poor were being used to provide overly generous benefits for the affluent.
The expanded subsidies also allowed states to game ACA to obtain Federal money that was used to provide insurance coverage for illegal immigrants. And no one has explained why health insurance for illegal immigrants is more important than actual delivery of medical care. The states are gaming the ACA system to make more money available to insurance providers rather than doctors and hospitals.
Whose fault is that ?
It's Joe Biden's and Democrats' fault. There was legitimate justification to temporarily expand the ACA subsidizes to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID pandemic. But extending those generous benefits after the pandemic ended was a stupid idea.
What the expanded subsidies accomplished was to make GOLD level plans affordable for the affluent. The overly generous subsidies to address the subsidy cliff made ACA insurance regressive; the less affluent began subsidizing the more affluent. And the blame for that belongs to only Joe Biden and Democrats.
Good answer
There you go. Somebody finally asked the correct question.
Why does Tesla and Amazon? Farmers, big banks, billionaires? Why?
Huh??? WTF does that mean? And why is it relevant?
Short answer: because nothing is free.
The Affordable Care Act was created partly to break the double digit inflation that was occurring in the cost of medical insurance. It was intended to do this by starting a public option which would have had the capability of negotiating prices paid for services and drugs, and having an individual mandate to make having insurance more palatable than not. The public option did not make it to the finish, and the individual mandate was zeroed out after passage, basically stripping the internal funding out of the act. The part that remained, the insurance exchanges, has seen decreasing participation by insurance companies because they assign the enrollees to a separate class, and due to the enrollees having higher medical needs, the prices increase by larger and larger amounts as health prices continue to rise faster than the rate of inflation.
So, the ACA requires subsidies because the funding and cost control features have been stripped from the act, leaving only an insurance marketplace that was always intended to be at least partially subsidized.
Or, according to chatGPT when I entered the above....
Absolutely nothing in the act was ever likely to do this, and key elements of the act had exactly the opposite effect.
The public option was a proposed concession to the "medicare for all" morons, and the individual mandate was designed to combat adverse selection. Both were terrible ideas that were never going to achieve what the people writing the law thought.
That's not what stripped the funding out of the Act. There were multiple lawsuits over this.
This is what happens when you let political science majors who don't know any math try to regulate things they don't begin to understand.
The healthcare exchange eliminated state risk pools. In the 38 NAIC states, some form of risk pool enabled high cost uninsurable individuals to get coverage, the claims of which were then subsidized by every insurer offering health coverage in that state. The worst risk group was effectively spread across the largest possible actuarial population, reducing the per capita impact. That's how it's supposed to be done. So naturally, our lawmakers did exactly the opposite.
When those risk pools went away, those high cost uninsurable claimants were driven into the individual insurance population, which only represents about 5% of the overall health insurance market. So we concentrated the highest risk people into the smallest actuarial group and then were somehow amazed to learn that actuarial science doesn't work like political science. No matter how much you argue with math, it doesn't change its mind.
To make it much worse, this enabled any insurer to avoid participating in those claims by simply choosing not to sell individual policies. Under the risk pool system, they were forced to participate.
Everybody with even a basic understanding of insurance saw that this was never going to work. But none of those people work in Cannon House.
What I am hearing you are say makes a pretty good argument for a National Healthcare Plan.
You go on and on about actuarial groupings, accepting them as if they were scribed on the back of the Ten Commandments, with addenda in the margins of the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.
Put everyone in the same group.
Remove these artificial filters and risk categories. They are inventions of man, not creations of natural science.
The reason they seem so enormous and immobile is because we have let people whose interests were not in caring for people but caring highly about profit to hold all the cards for too long. So we now have a nation divided into pools instead of a nation of people deserving of health care.
And here’s the punchline: it’s the most expensive way to stay sick and the hardest way to stay well. Yet somehow, we still defend it like gospel.
In the same way that "the East Wing of the White House has been destroyed" is a good argument for Donald Trump to be president.
Medicare for all represents the single greatest gift of corporate welfare ever imagined.
The ACA almost fell into that trap, until the math people at HHS enacted their own regulations to keep it from happening.
Welcome to the world of topsy-turvy.
Only if it is implemented improperly. There is an outstanding chance of that because quite a bit of money flows to Congress to make sure the Health Insurance/Healthcare industry's cow remains sacred.
If implemented properly, Medicare for All will reduce the amount that is spent on healthcare through removing the artificial actuarial groupings, the ability to negotiate prices, the ability to see a doctor regularly which will prevent emergency room visits... all without the overhead of rich corporations trying to ensure "more more more."
The ACA had stabilizing mechanisms built in at first: risk-corridors, CSR payments, and the mandate tax penalty, which were removed, defunded or zeroed out by Congress. The people at HHS didn't rescue the Act, they implemented it per the statute contained in the bill, as they were supposed to.
There is not a realistic way to do it properly from where we are now.
Eerily similar to the excuses made for socialism.
I am sorry to break this to you, but math is real. It's not like ideology, which is made up. No matter who pays the claims, the risks are still the same and still have to be calculated.
You conspicuously fail to address where the money US employers currently contribute will come from if they are let off the hook in your nationalized health insurance utopia.
I challenge you to examine waiting times in Canada.
In 2013, several Fortune 100 companies (like ATT) announced they would discontinue offering health plans to their employees and send them on to the marketplaces. The fine for violating the employer mandate was about 12% of what they were paying to insure employees and dependents. If the US Govt was willing to bear that cost, the big corporations were happy to let them.
This would have broken the program. A program designed and funded to handle 20 million people would have needed to support 150 million. You will no doubt remember that in the first years, online enrollment was a 90 minute process, with servers constantly overloaded and sessions constantly dropped. The enrollment deadlines had to be extended several times simply to accommodate server failures.
HHS stepped in at the 11th hour and created "The ObamaCare Glitch", which made it incredibly difficult to get a subsidy if anyone in your family had access to employer based health insurance. Realizing that canceling their health plans would leave their employees bearing that cost (and thus looking for new jobs), ATT et al relented and kept their plans in place.
In all, HHS issued a new of overhauls every month for the first 3 1/2 years of the act. Even they couldn't save Title VIII, which Obama's own HHS director publicly called "unworkable".
Just wait until all those farmers and lower income MAGA voters in red states see their healthcare insurance premiums become unaffordable. Families who are making $60,000 and taking home $45,000 will all go without before paying $20,000 a year for health insurance premiums.
I guess the affordable care act wasn't affordable, that piece of shit Obama and the democrats in Congress lied to the American people. No more payoffs to big insurance so democrats can get campaign donations.
Not how that works.
Yes It Is Jack...
You appear to be unfamiliar with the Affordable Care Act.
It's good to see that there a at least a few democrats who put Americans ahead of illegals. I see a primary challenge in Chucks future.
Other than hearing some complain about the shutdown, I did not notice much effect.
We had a huge job sidelined at work, causing numerous employees to scramble to find alternate projects to work on. While I can’t say what the project is, I can say that it is definitely not pork and is of such national importance that it will be resumed the moment the government gets its head out of its ass.
glad you didn't
Air travel. Other than that, I didn't notice much either.
The entire point of the shutdown was to keep Democrats mad through the election so they'd vote, particularly in Virginia. That's it. That's the advantage of a media that functions as their party pr and always blame the shutdown on Republicans, no matter who controls congress or the presidency. The lemmings stayed mad, they won their blue states so the shutdown became irrelevant.
The democrats are pivoting from doing nothing for the American people because of the shutdown to doing nothing for the American people because they are democrats.
Which branch of the government do the Dem's control again? Oh, none of them. Clearly repubs cannot lead or govern.
You should look up this term called the filibuster and and familiarize yourself with it to avoid such an easy mistake
Ha... so that's why the Dem's don't control any branch?
What was the deductibles on those plans?
There’s a reason the aca designer said it was intentionally designed to lack transparency and manipulate stupid people.