Why did 'centrist' Democrats cave? Because we were winning

There is no credible way to paint the collapse of Senate Democrats' resolve and subsequent Sunday night "deal" to end the government shutdown as anything but another round of party self-immolation. It is an utter and complete loss, all of it self inflicted. Once again, the institutionalists of the caucus intentionally sabotaged efforts to hold Republicans accountable for a crime spree that has seen Trump minions illegally gut government agencies, ignore congressional powers, put American cities under stupid and Naziism-inspired siege, and commit murder on the high seas for no better reason than a desire to watch it happen.

And it should go without saying, again, that Democratic caucus head Sen. Chuck Schumer needs to resign from his leadership position yesterday, and if he cannot fund the guts to do it then his caucus needs to find their own spines and make it happen themselves.

There is much about the supposed "deal" that reeks of a wider institutionalist effort to sabotage Democratic opposition. The attempt appeared to have picked up steam in the immediate aftermath of resounding Democratic election victories across America, last Tuesday. The plan to capitulate seems to have reached critical mass less than 48 hours after those wins.

At Thursday’s meeting, [eight Senate Democrats] told their caucus colleagues that they now had ten votes to reopen the government in exchange for no real Republican concessions. At that, much of the rest of the caucus went ballistic, and some of the supposed ten said that, in fact, they were not willing to vote for any such deal.

The leaders of the proposed Democratic cave-in, Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, both of New Hampshire, and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, then backed down. Only after that did Schumer go public with his proposal to reopen the government in exchange for a one-year extension of the ACA subsidies, along with a bipartisan commission to figure out a long-term solution.

That explains Schumer's sudden announcement Friday that Democrats would be willing to sign onto a budget deal for nothing more than a 1-year extension of ACA subsidies—a pitiful "deal" that Republicans nonetheless refused.

At first glance this would appear to be a "centrist"-led end-run around Schumer and a backstab of the rest of the caucus, but that's not quite what happened. The American Prospect reports that the group had Schumer's blessing to attempt to broker a deal. The group was "acting with the express approval of Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and were reporting to him daily," reports Robert Kuttner.

Informed observers tell me that the obvious compromise deal, which would allow each side to claim a partial victory, is either a shorter extension of the ACA subsidies for less than a year, or an extension with a partial cut at higher incomes. It remains to be seen whether both sides can get to yes.

Sunday's "deal" didn't even include that much. It was a full capitulation, and most of the supposed wins being touted by the dealmakers amount to something between nothing and less than nothing. You can measure the depth of the capitulation by dishonesty of the brokers' rhetoric—and these are people who know damn well they voted with Republicans in exchange for Nothing.

From Sen. Tim Kaine:

"I have long said that to earn my vote, we need to be on a path toward fixing Republicans’ health care mess and to protect the federal workforce.

This deal guarantees a vote to extend Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, which Republicans weren’t willing to do. 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.

This legislation will protect federal workers from baseless firings, reinstate those who have been wrongfully terminated during the shutdown, and ensure federal workers receive back pay, as required by a law I got passed in 2019. That’s a critical step that will help federal employees and all Americans who rely on government services. I’ll keep working towards a long-term government spending plan that includes critical priorities to support Virginians and funding for Virginia community projects."

The deal reopens the full government only through January, with some specified agencies and programs getting funding for 11 months rather than three. In exchange for being Right Back Here come February, Kaine's press release lists the supposed wins the capitulators most want to boast of.

1. A handshake deal to have a "vote" on the extension of ACA subsidies, without which millions of Americans are expected to see doubled or tripled (aka, impossible to afford) health insurance premiums. The deal does not extend the subsidies. It does not temporarily extend the subsidies. It only demands a Senate floor vote, one which Republicans will again vote down.
2. The deal will "ensure" federal workers get back pay, which is not a deal of any sort because, as Kaine notes, threats to withhold back pay from those workers is already illegal. Making it double-illegal is of no further value. If House and Senate Republicans are so invested in allowing Trump's illegal behavior that are willing to allow him to close entire agencies in openly illegal fashion, winning a meaningless assurance that they will feel extra bad if Trump does it in this particular case is the rationalization of a domestic abuse victim.
3. A deal to reinstate, allegedly, federal workers who were wrongfully fired by Trump during the shutdown in White House moves to make the shutdown as permanently damaging as possible. The "deal" does not, however, do anything to reinstate the massive number of federal workers who were illegally fired by Trump's minions during the incompetent, "DOGE"-led purges that have been happening for nearly a year now.

There is no acknowledgement of military deployments to cities, to the detainment and alleged torture of American citizens in Homeland Security-contracted detention centers, or of any other violations of American rights and federal laws, nor is there any demand that the administration's blatant bribery schemes be probed, or Trump's abominably corrupt pardons of criminal lackeys, or any of the rest. The deal is a toothless promise to hold a vote that Democrats will lose and and even more toothless promise that Republicans, who have giddily backed illegal acts from the Trump administration for ten months now, will make Trump's illegal withholding of worker back pay and likely-illegal shutdown firings slightly more illegal, which will allegedly solve the problem.

Nothing. The caving Democrats negotiated their hearts out to find something worth capitulating for, and in the end agreed to walk away with nothing.

As for why this group of Democrats chose to cave: They chose to cave because Democrats were winning.

That isn't a self-contradicting statement. It is the truth of it, and it's a continuation of a now decade-plus pattern of Democratic institutionalists surrendering in the face of more and more blatant Republican extremism for the sake of preserving status-quo rules and norms that those Republicans threaten to (and sometimes do) do away with if Democrats do not capitulate to their demands.

Democratic unity has been shockingly robust, in both the House and Senate, in wanting conditions placed on future funding of the Trump-led administration. Democratic voters have been vocal in their extreme ire for Democratic lawmakers who ignore the extremism and authoritarian moves of Trump-backing Republicans, and historically massive public rallies have demonstrated the raw anger that even normally nonpartisan Americans have when faced with scenes of tear gassed families, zip-tied children, and the daily parade of videos in which paramilitary-geared thugs smash car windows and rough up whichever passersby they happen to see. An economic collapse is now almost assured, due to the damage of Trump's incompetently run tariff regime and the collapse of federal functions after Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Stephen Miller broke countless laws to purge workers in those agencies.

Those who voted Democratic lawmakers into office are, by and large, quite certain that democracy is under threat and that the rank criminality of Trump's Republican accomplices must be addressed—and that has provided the necessary support for those lawmakers to find their courage and oppose Trump's acts.

After Tuesday's election victories, Democrats were in a remarkably strong position. Even Trump himself claimed that the Republican shellacking was due to the government shutdown. House and Senate Democrats remained unified. The framework for a potential agreement had long been solidifying: It was not just the ACA subsidies that needed to be addressed, but Democrats could not vote for the Republican budget unless it was paired with accountability for the administration's illegal acts up until now.

Doing anything less would amount to Democrats endorsing the White House's attacks on the rule of law. And so Republicans, rather than Democrats, were the ones forced into a corner. Either Republican leaders would agree to some small fig leaf of accountability, something that would likely enrage Trump but which would give Democrats sufficient excuses for their votes when facing angry voters ...

... or Senate Republicans would be forced into Trump's preferred solution, altering Senate rules to abolish the filibuster, which would then allow Republicans to pass their government funding bills despite Democratic demands.

The filibuster is a longtime Senate rule that allows debate on a bill to continue indefinitely, unless there are a supermajority of votes to close that debate. The current threshold is 60 votes; it was once more. It is a Senate tradition, not a constitutional edict, and it has been whittled down in power as Senate partisanship has grown more intractable.

If you are looking for the reason seven Democratic senators, one Democratic-allied independent, Democratic leadership and an unknown number of private Senate accomplices scrambled to find any possible excuse to cave to Republican abuses, only to come away with a big fat Nothing, there's your reason. It was looking increasingly likely that the shutdown would continue until a collection of Republicans could be found who were not willing to act as accomplices to Trump's illegal acts—and no such coalition appears to exist—or Republicans would be forced into killing the filibuster.

And, to a large group of long-serving senators who consider the rules of their body to be worth preservation even if the rest of the country collapses around them, the thought of losing the filibuster could not be stomached. The more leverage Democrats gained in their demands to hold the Trump administration accountable, the greater the risk became that Republicans would change Senate rules out from under them.

In most stories describing this capitulation, the deal brokers are referred to as "centrist" Democrats or "moderates." Those aren't useful descriptions and I, for one, wish pundits would strip both terms from their vocabulary. When one side is advocating for illegal acts and the other is not, there is nothing "centrist" in proposed bargains to let the illegality slide in exchange for, for example, this or that tax credit.

If one side is advocating for ethnic cleansing, hardline nationalism, supreme authority of a dear leader figure, redemptive violence, and each of the other defining obsessions of fascism, then there is no such thing as a "centrist" in that fight. There are only fascists and non-fascists.

The proper descriptor for the group of Democrats that is forever willing to acquiesce to Republican extremism is institutionalists. They value the institution of the Senate over the outcomes that the Senate produces—much like the Supreme Court regularly insists that the innocence of a death row inmate is of less importance than the procedures that might have steamrolled over that innocence.

The goal of institutionalists is the preservation of the status quo. Injustice may be bad, but reforms are seen as equally disruptive; what is most important of all is to maintain a steady, bland indifference to the major questions of the day. Tinkering around the edges of what exists is seen as the highest and best use of their effort; reforming what exists will turn them immediately hostile.

And what we have seen, over and over again, is an aging population of House and Senate institutionalists who do not give a particular shit if paramilitary violence is happening in their represented states and cities, if the only other recourse is major institutional reforms. That is why health insurance reform efforts were akin to pulling teeth, and why the system remains broken even now, when it is obvious to everyone with a brain that our for-profit insurance systems are dysfunctional, profiteering disasters.

Among reform-minded Democratic-allied political observers, many have been openly daring Republicans to end the filibuster. Its historical use has always been to block reforms in favor of stasis. It is true, a Senate without the filibuster would be a more chaotic place, but if Democrats are ever to hold Donald Trump and his odious sedition-backing allies to account then it would have to be over the filibuster's dead body.

Republicans have repeatedly run roughshod over Democratic opposition merely by threatening to end this or that Senate rule, at which point Senate institutionalists meekly surrender rather than risk it. If the rules exist only for Democrats but can be discarded when Republicans feel threaten, then the rules are already broken. Acknowledging it outright would not be worse.

The real truth of the matter is that the Senate itself is an obsolete, deeply broken institution that ought not exist. It is deeply unrepresentative; if it weren't written into the Constitution from the start, anyone proposing a similarly structured body in this day and age would be either laughed at or punched. But we aren't going to rid ourselves of it without a constitutional amendment—although at present, Trump is already very close to rendering it powerless. With Republican help, of course.

Fascism cannot be defeated with self-protecting institutionalists. It cannot be done. Fascism exists, as we are currently again witnessing, by subverting institutions, turning legislative and judicial rules against justice and into tools for protecting its own power. The pardon power, now used to reward criminals who act on the movement's behalf. The legislature, turned into a retroactive endorser of Dear Leader's whims and a tool to block investigation into his alleged illegal acts. The Supreme Court, fresh off a term in which it declared that presidents have tightly constrained powers, now with new weekly pronouncements that Dear Leader's allies are allowed to break plainly written laws due to newly discovered inherent powers that morph according to circumstances.

This Democratic Party cannot function as the opposition, because it is not the opposition. It privileges wealth over justice, corporate power over reform, and performance over convictions. Whatever role Sen. Chuck Schumer may or may not have played in orchestrating this latest full capitulation, his inability to stop it is sufficient grounds for electing new leadership.

And it should be noted that federal employees themselves are, by and large, furious at the capitulation. If Democrats were going to cave without meaningfully protecting them, then the shutdown was pointless harm to begin with.

What is required, at minimum, is a purge of party institutionalists in favor of those who are at least willing to acknowledge the unprecedented nature of our times. We have to primary these people. We have to devote all possible effort to finding reformists willing to meet the moment with action, not absurd rhetoric.

This is exhausting. It is also absurd. We have, in the Democratic Party, a large coalition of do-nothings who appear to believe their position as lawmakers is a near-birthright, and who have no particular interest in protecting our country if protecting our country would require more efforts than not. No more patience for these enablers. Republicans and Democrats both, all enablers of the current crisis need to be run out of town.