The Shutdown Looks Done. Trump Won, Democrats Lost.

At long last, well over a month after it started, it appears that we are now nearing the end of the government shutdown, because last night, Democrats in the Senate caved.

Eight of them approved moving forward with the procedural vote, which would move the process toward the end of the government shutdown.

Make no mistake: Democrats lost. President Trump won. The Republicans won.

Democrats themselves know they lost. The win they did get was by showing that they were resistant to President Trump’s agenda. They did better than they might have otherwise in places like Virginia or Georgia or Mississippi or New Jersey, or even in New York.

In other words, there is a very rabid base of Democrats who are very interested in resisting President Trump. But the reason that the Democratic dam is breaking regarding the government shutdown is because Democrats who are in purple states recognize that if they continue to aimlessly pound their heads against the Trumpian wall, they are going to lose their Senate seats.

That’s what happened last night.

According to Axios, which first reported what was going on, “Eight Senate Democrats broke ranks to advance a deal that reverses shutdown RIFs, funds the government until late January, promises a vote on Affordable Care Act tax credits, and funds several agencies. Democratic negotiators acknowledged that negotiations were going nowhere. In the end, fatigue and frustration triumphed over anger and anxiety at President Trump.”

Democrats were attempting to use the fiscal cliff here. They were attempting to use the non-funding of the government as a way to pry open the coffers again to continue the Obamacare subsidies.

So what, exactly, did Democrats get out of this? A kind of guarantee that people who were fired during the government shutdown would come back to work. The government will remain funded until late January, and it promises a future vote, but not a guarantee on extending that Obamacare subsidy.

That’s something Senate Majority Leader John Thune had promised weeks ago. That was one of his early offers: Here’s the deal. You extend the CR, and then we will, in three weeks, have an open vote on whether to extend the Obamacare subsidies. You guys will probably lose because you don’t have a majority, and then we’ll move on with our lives.

Democrats rejected that because they were using the shutdown as leverage to get Republicans to restore funding for these Obamacare supplemental subsidies. 

Four former governors, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, which is a very, very purplish state; Independent Senator Angus King of Maine, again in purplish state, and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia — which has a bunch of civilian federal workers — broke the six-week stalemate, joining people like Senator John Fetterman, as well as Nevada Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen.

You’ll notice that all of these people are from purple states. So it’s very easy for Senator Chuck Schumer from New York — not a purple state — to vote “no” on opening the government. Very, very easy for Senator Alex Padilla from California to vote “no” on opening the government, or for Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts to do so. She’s not going to lose her seat.

But if you are a Democrat and you are looking at the possibility of losing your seat because you’re in a purple state, then it was not in your interest for this government shutdown to continue.

The GOP leadership in the House is saying that Congresspeople should be on notice within 48 hours, 36 hours perhaps. Then they need to be back at the Capitol in order to vote.

Democrats are very, very angry at this because they had staked their political stance on the idea that under no circumstances would they reopen the government unless they got what they wanted.

Just before the shutdown, for example, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said, “We’re going to keep it going.” This is literally right before the Senate voted in order to end the shutdown. He stated, “America under Donald Trump and Republican policies has become far too expensive, while at the same time dealing with the Republican health care crisis that threatens to drive up premiums, co-pays and deductibles to levels that will be unaffordable for working class Americans because of the Republicans’ refusal to extend the Affordable Care Act.”

I love that this is somehow a Republican health care crisis. When Obamacare was created purely by Democrats, it was increasingly subsidized by Democrats. So it’s a Republican crisis?

If Democrats can’t get the cost curve down, it’s a Democratic crisis because Obamacare is a gigantic failure. It has not made Americans healthier in any measurable way, and has not bent the cost curve in any serious way.

The American people are getting very, very tired of this. Sean Duffy, the Transportation Secretary, said that even if the shutdown ends, it’s going to take a while for these kinks to work themselves through the system.

We have been highlighting the split in the Democratic Party between people who actually want to get things done and people who do not want to get things done, between these so-called moderate Democrats — people like Abigail Spanberger in Virginia or John Fetterman in Pennsylvania — and the increasingly progressive, wild-eyed Democrats.

Thus, many Democrats who broke ranks are coming under significant fire.

This was a misbegotten strategy from the very beginning. The only thing it got Democrats was a political win because it got Democrats out to the ballot box.

But — they’re willing to take the American people hostage, politically speaking, in order to get what they want here.

This is the first government shutdown that I can remember in which the government was shut down — not in order to extract concessions to lower spending — but in order to exact concessions to increase spending.

That’s an amazing thing to say, “I’m not going to fund the government so I can get more funding for the government.”

That’s an insane proposition.

And that’s what Democrats were doing here.