The Senate's surrender to Trumpism is another lost opportunity—but not insurmountable

Now that we've all had another day to stew over institutionalist Democrats sabotaging yet another attempt to holding congressional Republicans accountable for the Trump administration's illegal acts, let's revisit and see if things look any clearer.

I'll agree in part with Josh Marshall's take on the Senate surrender: While it's an utter humiliation for Senate Democrats, for the umpteenth time, the "overall situation and outcome" is not as dire as it has been after past Democratic-led screw-ups. The government will (probably) reopen, the SNAP benefits that Trump's evil band of shitgibbons intentionally withheld so as to maximize public pain will flow again—unless, of course, Trump simply turns them back off again, because what Senate Democrats did lose is their best leverage to force Republicans to acknowledge, and rein in, the imperial executive's new assertions that Congressional budgets and mandates are optional and any Trump underling from Elon Musk to Russell Vought to Stephen Miller to Marco Rubio can simply shutter whatever federal agencies they want to.

So you can't even call this a "budget deal," because it's been made clear, yet again, that the House and Senate can pass whatever budgets they want to pass, the president can breezily sign them, and then the president can simply tell Congress he's going to ignore the new budgets and if they don't like it they can pound sand.

Republicans are, for whatever reasons, happy to engage in this bizarre new theater where they themselves are stripped of tariff powers, budget powers, oversight powers, and even the ability to publicly complain about that. The budget shutdown was the most leverage administration opponents in the Senate have yet had, and likely the most leverage they'll get between now and next year's midterms, in their attempts to force Republicans into confronting Trump's illegal actions.

But they couldn't manage it, and if there's any good news here it's that well, at least they didn't actually fucking try. Senate leadership instead opted for the consultant-fueled, focus group obsessed approach of demanding a weak temporary extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies while mostly setting aside the larger fight on whether Republicans could offer any assurance that the Republican administration wouldn't tear up whatever Congress passed and instead spend the money on a 50-story solid gold statue of Dear Leader giving America the finger.

Voters will reward us for fighting for their health insurance, senators insisted, because that's a "kitchen table issue" and whether or not Trump keeps sending paramilitary thugs to American cities, keeps kidnapping American citizens off the streets, keeps taking obvious bribes, hands over the U.S. military to Stephen Miller, pardons the planners of an attempted coup and is quite visibly suffering from delusions—those are not kitchen table issues and voters don't care.

Except, of course, all the Americans who just marched in the largest demonstrations in U.S. history, which were about all those other things. Those people don't count because, again, loser-ass consultant brain.

Thanks to the efforts of eight senators and an unknown but probably equal number of accessories, we don't have to worry about which side is right because those senators negotiated themselves into what was the Republican position all along: Democrats vote for what we say, and in exchange Democrats get nothing.

Thought 1:

The more I sit with it, the more I'm convinced that the impetus behind the institutionalist Dem surrender was the growing realization that Republicans didn't intend to offer anything, mostly due to their fear of Trump's criticism, and were becoming increasingly likely to go along with Trump's order to eliminate the Senate filibuster so that Republicans could pass whatever he wanted them to pass without further argument. Trump was growing increasingly vocal in this demand, which is a bit curious because I don't think any of us truly believe Donald Trump understands the filibuster any more than he understands the nuclear triad or what a dementia screening test looks like—presumably he is again simply parroting hardline aides like Vought.

The evidence for this is, so far, purely circumstantial. But it fits with the past pattern of Senate institutionalist surrenders: Republicans are allowed to be perennially obstructive, but on the few occasions the Democratic caucus musters up the ability to obstruct something of real consequence, during times of Republican control, Republicans immediately threaten to change the voting rules because Democrats aren't allowed to do that. Sometimes, as with Democratic obstruction of unqualified far-right judges, the filibuster and other minority party rights are indeed whittled down. Far more often, though, a group of long-serving, bipartisanship-humping institutionalists announce that preserving Senate norms is the more important fight. So they cave.

Reformists outside the Senate were publicly daring Republicans to kill off the filibuster, as the filibuster is nearly always used to sabotage progress in favor of the status quo. Senators, however, like it very much; it provides a technocratic way to undermine new policies while keeping public statements wishy-washy and vague.

Thought 2:

Whatever the reason, it's clear that the so-called "centrist" Democrats were looking for a way to surrender first, worrying about what they might ask for in exchange for the surrender either second or not at all.

This is obvious, because the "deal" they settled for was one in which they got nothing at all, not even the half-assed compromise on a compromise the group was previously said to be trying for. Republicans gave nothing. They agreed to hold a vote on extending the ACA subsidies—which immediately failed. They agreed that federal workers would get back pay for their lost income during the shutdown—which was already federal law to begin with.

Democrats can point to an 11-month extension of funding of SNAP benefits, except as we've seen there's no assurance that Trump will abide by the deal and considerable evidence he won't.

What the centrists get is an end to the fight. Everybody gives up, goes home, the fight resumes in earnest after the holidays.

The evidence that these eight-plus senators had decided to surrender first and negotiate second is the bumbling excuses provided for why they did it. If they were truly moved by The Plight Of The People, they could have said that and it would at least have given their critics some pause:

Now that's a good public argument to make! It focuses in on the deliberate evil being inflicted by Trump's goon squad and enablers! It's a kitchen table issue! Sure, go with that!

Instead, leaders of the surrender didn't even mention that wider public suffering, which is a pretty good indication it never came up. And it's that incompetence of both strategy and messaging that shows the supposed "centrists" to have been focused on surrendering as quickly as possible, before even they themselves had time to plan out their excuses.

Thought 3:

There's considerable debate over Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer's role here. It seems evident that Schumer was on board with the centrist back-channel negotiations. It's also not a given that that strategy was in error; if the surrender caucus was going to go rogue, it was likely wiser for Schumer to ask to be in that loop than out of it.

There have been multiple reports claiming that the "centrists" had wanted to announce their surrender for some time now, but that Schumer convinced them to hold off until after Tuesday's elections so as to not have such a visible example of Democratic appeasement hanging over every Democratic candidate's head come voting time. If so, that was a successful Schumer effort (and matches up with my suspicions that the cave-in caucus started organizing their surrender immediately after Trump started making demands to end the filibuster.)

If it's true, then it might even count as showing some progress in Democratic ranks. The consultant class claim has been that voters like capitulation, aka bipartisanship, and so there was more to gain by capitulating early so that voters could reward the surrender at the ballot box.

In most years, Democratic leaders would have been gullible enough to actually believe that. It may have taken the largest mass demonstrations in United States history to change their minds, but it appears that this time around, even top Democratic leaders are beginning to realize that voters want to see the party oppose Republican extremism, not ignore it.

So what we have here is, yet again, a Democratic Party in disarray. How familiar. But it can be worked to reformers' advantage, since now we have another example of Democratic institutionalism sabotaging another attempt to force lawmakers into acknowledging the deep rot of Trump-led Republicanism. The whole premise of institutional Democratic stagnation is that "the left" are the outliers, party-killers who ignore calls to unity to grouse about pet issues like "don't use the military to kill random fishermen" or "we should probably do something to prevent worldwide climate-related devastation."

In practice, though, we've seen that reformists like New York's Mamdani can be tremendously popular—and it is oligarchic institutionalists who more often play the role of saboteurs if the Democratic Party doesn't abide by their own wishes.

Primaries, primaries, primaries. That's the way out of this. Candidates with a positive vision for the future not based on on asking for little and delivering even less, and candidates willing to show Trump and his Republican backers as the authoritarian-minded frothing idiots that they are. Republicans are seeking out every available path to thwart voters from casting ballots in the midterms. We are not, even in the best of circumstances, going to boost turnout enough to counteract those attempts without candidates who do not reek of complacency and self-interest.