Democratic unity fractures, paving the way for the government to reopen

Enough Democrats caved.

A Sunday night Senate deal may be on the verge of resolving the longest government shutdown on record — after a group of moderate Democrats dropped their key demand — a guaranteed extension of Obamacare subsidies.

The agreement opened the way for a Senate vote in which eight Democratic defectors voted to break the filibuster and to clear the first hurdle to reopening the government after nearly six weeks. Their move will offer relief to millions of Americans whose lives have been severely disrupted by the shutdown.

But the compromise was opposed by some key party leaders and is already igniting a firestorm of protests from progressives who accuse their more moderate colleagues of disastrously backing down, handing President Donald Trump a victory and turning their backs on millions of Americans who can’t afford spiking health care premiums.

“I will not support a deal that does nothing to make health care more affordable,” Democratic Sen Elizabeth Warren, a leading progressive, wrote on X. “We are in a health care emergency. … A vote for this bill is a mistake.”

It might be crass to parse the human misery caused by the shutdown for a partisan win after a political duel that deprived millions of Americans of food benefits, left federal workers with $0 paychecks, and created chaos and safety fears in commercial aviation.

But the crisis — precipitated by the expiration of enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans, whose prices are skyrocketing — was fought for multilayered political reasons. It will influence judgments on Trump’s second presidency and the Republican majorities in Congress and help define the trajectory of the Democratic Party’s comeback bid ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

The deal sets a date for a vote in the Senate on ACA subsidies in December, but falls well short of cementing their extension. It funds the government through January 30 and guarantees pay for federal workers furloughed during the shutdown and those who worked without pay. It also reverses Trump’s firing of federal employees throughout the impasse and funds food stamps through 2026.

Once the package works through procedural steps in the Senate, the Republican-led House must be recalled to vote on the measure.

A ‘political disaster’

The headline here is that sufficient numbers of Democrats are folding without achieving the goal that led them to withhold votes from a government funding bill and halt federal operations at the beginning of October.

On the face of it, this looks like a massive failure. Democrats won no undertaking that Obamacare subsidies will be extended — despite insisting that such a move was their bottom line. The best they will get is a Senate vote. There is no guarantee that a bill extending subsidies will pass, considering the Senate’s GOP majority. And the prospects of the Republican House endorsing it seem even more remote.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a progressive leader who sits as an independent but votes with Democrats, said the compromise risked “a policy and political disaster.” He added before the Senate vote: “My own thought is that it would be a horrific mistake to cave in to Trump right now.”

Many leading Democrats argued their party’s big wins in elections in New Jersey, Virginia and New York City last week were attributable to the effective way their candidates lacerated Trump over the cost of living.

Now, at the first chance they got to put that lesson into practice — fighting for the affordability of health care — they gave up, even though polls showed most voters blame Trump for the shutdown and agree with the Democratic position.

The blowback could be severe, exposing deep divisions in the party that may show the “big tent” that leaders kept citing in the aftermath of last week’s election victories may be more viable in theory than in practice.

There were many unhappy Democrats inside and outside the Senate. Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego warned he would not turn his back on Americans seeing their premiums sharply rise as he voted no on the resolution. “At a time when prices are already too high, Americans are shopping for health insurance and experiencing such sticker shock that they are being forced to sign up for a crappy, overpriced plan or not signing up for insurance at all,” he said.

The leader of the Senate Democrats, Chuck Schumer, did not vote for the deal. But Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the party’s No. 2 leader in the chamber, who is retiring next year and is therefore shielded from a left-wing backlash, supported it.

Another Democrat who voted for the deal, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, represents thousands of federal workers and welcomed the move to reverse firings during the shutdown. He also argued that the Senate vote on extending the enhanced subsidies would put the GOP on the spot. “Lawmakers know their constituents expect them to vote for it, and if they don’t, they could very well be replaced at the ballot box by someone who will,” Kaine said.

A more pragmatic view of the Democratic concessions

Still, assessments of the break in the deadlock that came on Day 40 of the shutdown must also factor in whether the Democrats’ demand was achievable in the first place and whether the deepening pain of the shutdown, which is fast becoming a national crisis, was about to make their position unsustainable.

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat who opposed the shutdown all along, warned his party might overplay its hand by carrying on. “I don’t think much anything has been accomplished for the last 40 days except a lot of chaos and a lot of upheaval,” Fetterman told reporters.

Democratic leaders, dealing with intense fury over Trump’s bulldozing presidency among their base, and disillusionment over the party’s disastrous 2024 election loss, had no real political option but to fight — even if it was obvious that securing an extension to Obamacare subsidies might be unattainable.

The party may accrue some political benefits for forcing Trump into the longest-ever shutdown. Multiple polls showed more Americans blamed him and his party at a time when his approval ratings are dipping into the kind of steep slump second-term presidents struggle to reverse.

Throughout the shutdown, Trump, a billionaire surrounded by a Cabinet of millionaires and billionaires, seemed indifferent to the daily struggles of millions of Americans. It was easy for Democrats to portray him as cruel as his administration fought court orders to restore funding to food assistance for 42 million Americans. While Trump is pledging to talk more about affordability, that is an impression that might stick.

And there is an unpalatable truth that some progressives prefer not to contemplate. Democrats have almost no power in Washington. They’ve used their only leverage — the capacity to withhold their votes in the Senate, where 60 votes are required for most legislation — to frustrate a president who gets almost no pushback. That’s not nothing.

Trump seemed quite willing to allow the pain and anxiety of the shutdown to deepen for millions of Americans. He was implicitly daring Democrats to pick the suffering of one set of millions of Americans over the duress being experienced by millions more. With the president refusing to negotiate, it was incumbent on Democrats to consider whether the cost of carrying on was justified.

Progressives are already dismayed about what many will see as a humiliating climbdown by Senate moderates. But another lesson from Democratic wins in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races last week was that moderate candidates racked up big victory margins. A pragmatic view of the shutdown as it stood on Sunday was that as the fast-worsening consequences became clear — with Thanksgiving travel chaos looming — Democrats may have risked losing their incremental political gains if public opinion swung against them as well as the GOP.

In that sense, the classic building of pressure that historically ends up forcing the reopening of the government — namely that political damage caused by carrying on is outweighed by the advantage of staying shut down — did its work again, albeit belatedly.

“Unfortunately, it’s become clear as we go deeper into the second month of this Republican government shutdown that President Trump and Washington Republicans are weaponizing their power in alarming ways to inflict unimaginable pain and suffering on working people, like fully withholding SNAP benefits and gutting our tourism industry by grinding air travel to a halt,” Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada said in a statement after voting to support the compromise deal.

But whatever the recriminations, there’s no doubt Democrats succeeded in highlighting a core issue — the exploding cost of health care — which the GOP seems to have no viable plan to tackle.

The shutdown has not changed this issue: The health care system is broken, people may lose insurance, and Republicans may end up with the blame if they don’t fix it, since they are the party in power.

Trump didn’t cave, but he may have badly damaged his brand anyway

Given the exhausting pace of the Trump presidency, and the multiple controversies unfolding at once under the chaos agent in the White House, it seems unlikely a shutdown now will play a major role in influencing the 2026 midterm elections.

Trump may have gotten what he wanted.

Throughout his presidency, business career and life, Trump has always tried to impose personal leverage. His self-image as a winner who doesn’t give into pressure will exit the shutdown intact. Trump was determined not bend to Democrats employing the kind of hardline tactics he so often uses himself. And he didn’t. The president warned that he wouldn’t negotiate on health care with the government closed. And he held firm.

But the political cost wrought by his actions over the last 40 days could be considerable. He often looked callous, as though unconcerned about the real pain inflicted by the shutdown. After all, he went to the Supreme Court to try to overturn a court order requiring him to pay food stamp benefits. And when the deal was struck in the Senate on Sunday night, he was absent — after attending a Washington Commanders NFL game and spending the weekend at his luxury resort in Florida, reinforcing an impression he doesn’t care about the economic concerns of regular Americans.

And Republicans are still not off the hook on the enhanced Obamacare subsidies. GOP leaders now face the question of whether they are willing to let them expire, in a scenario that could put health care out of reach for millions of people. This seems an unsustainable political position in the run-up to midterm elections, and the issue is set to only gain in traction as the end of the year looms.

And bitter divisions in the GOP — most graphically exemplified during the shutdown by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, with her scathing criticism of her party’s dearth of ideas on health care — are likely to burst open when the House returns from its weekslong absence, and will again test the authority of Speaker Mike Johnson.

The shutdown drama also revealed rare signs that Trump’s authority over his own party isn’t absolute on Capitol Hill. Republican senators ignored his demands to abolish the filibuster that requires most bills to get 60 votes in the chamber. Such a move would have given Trump almost unlimited power to use GOP majorities to transform the nation over the next year.

But GOP senators feared what any Democratic majority might do in the absence of the filibuster. Their position was a nod to a future in which Trump is not the dominant GOP figure, underscoring that lame-duck status may beckon even for a president who has shattered almost every convention of his office.

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