Coming out of Tuesday’s election blowout, the Democrats were riding high and unified. They won big in places like New Jersey that were supposed to be close. Republicans were taking increasing blame for the government shutdown, now in its sixth week. The Republicans were fracturing, with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) wanting a deal and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) stonewalling. And Trump’s rants made him increasingly irrelevant.
Less than a week later, it is Democrats who have given it all away, and Democrats who are fractured.
As I reported Saturday, the cave-in began at Thursday’s Senate Democratic caucus meeting. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer had been publicly insisting that any deal to continue Trump’s current budget had to add continued subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. But privately, Schumer was encouraging a centrist Gang of Eight to keep negotiating with Republicans and settle for a lot less.
On Friday, Schumer announced his latest plan: a deal to reopen the government in exchange for a one-year extension of the ACA subsidies. Predictably, that was dead on arrival.
Meanwhile, the eight centrists, with Schumer’s backing, were negotiating their own deal. Their leaders were Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
On Sunday night, their deal passed the Senate, 60-40, with eight Democrats voting with the Republicans. (The other four were John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Dick Durbin of Illinois.) Schumer voted against it, in the hope that his vote would conceal his fingerprints. He fooled no one. The man’s cynicism knows no bounds.
The deal includes a continuing resolution to reopen all of government through January, and some of it for the entire fiscal year. The measure also provides for a separate vote in December on ACA subsidies, which is meaningless because the Republicans will vote it down. The heart of the deal is the three appropriations bills that include a few sweeteners, including a provision to reverse layoffs of federal workers made during the shutdown, and to provide immediate back pay for those who had been working without pay.
Those measures were enough to bring along Kaine, who represents many federal workers, as a crucial eighth vote in favor of the deal. But his Virginia colleague, Mark Warner, who is up for re-election next year, withheld his support. And there is nothing in the deal that prevents Trump from continuing to impound duly appropriated funds in much of the government.
Other Senate Democrats have vowed to keep fighting. One tactic: They plan to refuse to yield back the balance of their debate time, a kind of mini-filibuster that could delay final passage for several days.
Here’s the worst part. Any hope on the part of Schumer and the centrist Democrats getting credit for reopening the government is now swamped by the political story of Republicans dividing Democrats and reopening the government on Republican terms.
THE PLAY NOW SHIFTS TO THE HOUSE. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told me that she flatly opposes the deal, and that she expects the House Democrats to stay unified.
House Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a strong statement against the deal. “We will not support spending legislation advanced by Senate Republicans that fails to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. We will fight the GOP bill in the House of Representatives, where Mike Johnson will be compelled to end the seven-week Republican taxpayer-funded vacation.”
So far, only one conservative Democrat has defected. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) has said he will vote for the continuing resolution, though sources say that a handful of others are likely to vote with Republicans.
Passing the continuing resolution requires Speaker Johnson to call the House back into session. That means he must seat Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who won a special election on September 23rd. Not only will Grijalva become the 218th vote to compel Justice Department release of the Epstein files, but her seating will further narrow the Republican majority.
Mostly, House Republicans have voted in lockstep with Trump. But as the support of at least four Republicans for the Epstein discharge petition shows, not always. It would only take the opposition of a few House deficit hawks to kill the whole budget scheme.
Nor is it clear what the always narcissistic Trump will do. A normal president would grasp the self-humiliation of the Senate Democrats, take credit for reopening of the government, and whip House Republicans to go along. But there are some items in the Senate deal that Trump doesn’t like. The three appropriations measures add spending that Trump has cut. The deal forces reversals of reductions in force of civil servants, and explicitly saves the Food for Peace program, which Trump wants to kill.
In this topsy-turvy political era, let’s see whether self-defeating House Republicans save self-defeating Senate Democrats from themselves.