Democrats Were on a Roll. Why Stop Now?

Opinion|Democrats Were on a Roll. Why Stop Now?

Back in September, when I was reporting out a piece on whether Democrats should shut down the government, I kept hearing the same warning from veterans of past shutdown fights: The president controls the bully pulpit. He controls, to some degree, which parts of the government stay open and which parts close. It is very, very hard for the opposition party to win a shutdown.

But Democrats were winning this one. Polls showed most voters blamed Republicans, not Democrats, for the shutdown — perhaps because President Trump was bulldozing the East Wing of the White House rather than negotiating to reopen the government. Trump’s approval rating has been falling — in CNN’s tracking poll, it dipped into the 30s for the first time since Trump took office again. And last week, Democrats wrecked Republicans in the elections and Trump blamed his party’s losses in part on the shutdown. Democrats were riding higher than they have been in months.

Then, over the weekend, a group of Senate Democrats broke ranks and negotiated a deal to end the shutdown in return for — if we’re being honest — very little.

The guts of the deal are this: Food assistance — both SNAP and WIC, I was told — get a bit more funding and there are a few other modest concessions on spending levels elsewhere in the government. Laid-off federal workers will be rehired and furloughed federal workers given back pay. Most gallingly, the deal does nothing to extend the expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits over which Democrats ostensibly shut down the government in the first place. All it offers is a promise from Republicans to hold a vote on the tax credits in the future. Most of the government is funded only until the end of January. So get ready: We could be doing this again in a few months.

The A.C.A. subsidies always played a strange role in the shutdown: Democrats said the shutdown was about the subsidies, but for most of them, it wasn’t. It was about Trump’s authoritarianism. It was about showing their base — and themselves — that they could fight back. It was about treating an abnormal political moment abnormally.

But there were a number of Senate Democrats who didn’t want a shutdown. Whatever they thought of Trump, they didn’t think a shutdown was going to stop him. Instead, it would hurt people they cared about. It would degrade services they fought to protect or even create. And there was another group of Senate Democrats who doubted that their voters cared that much about masked ICE agents and Trump’s corruption. Democrats, they argued, already had the votes of anyone worried about masked ICE agents. What Democrats needed were the votes of people worried about the cost of living.