The U.S. Senate passed a bill to end the longest government shutdown in the country's history, with some Democrats breaking rank to support it.Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
A brutal American political war is coming to an end. A bitter American political war is breaking out.
The record-long government shutdown is winding down, struggling families will regain food aid, federal workers will return to work and receive back pay, historical and recreational venues will reopen, and flight schedules will return to normal just in time for the Thanksgiving travel rush.
Also ending is the brief moment of Democratic solidarity in their struggle against President Donald Trump, just as his MAGA movement had been showing dangerous signs of division on Capitol Hill and in one of its pre-eminent policy foundations.
For weeks the Democrats were, by most assessments, winning the Washington battle by clinging to tax credits for Obamacare health plans, fighting severe cuts in food assistance to the poor and portraying Mr. Trump, the MAGA insurgency and Republicans in Washington as heartless enemies of ordinary Americans.
U.S. House returns to Washington for vote to end longest shutdown in history
Then a clutch of seven of them and Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats, joined Republican senators in crafting a compromise that would restore government operations and the salaries of federal workers but not preserve the health care tax credits.
The result: an explosion of fury and resentment that is tearing apart a party that already approached this moment with deep-seated divisions, a sense of helplessness and aimlessness and a lack of identifiable national leadership in the Trump era. Two of the principal opponents of the move to end the shutdown are Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and the House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also of New York.
This episode, a direct challenge to Mr. Schumer, a legendary survivor of political wars with 44 years of Capitol experience, spawned new questions about his ability to keep his caucus together – or at least in line.
“Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced,” Representative Ro Khanna of California, a moderate who is a possible Democratic presidential candidate, said on social-media platform X. “If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?” Others echoed that view.
All this has spawned an important question for the party as it prepares for midterm congressional elections less than a year from now and, more critical, a presidential election in 2028: Just what is the profile of the Democrats right now?
They won decisive victories in New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections with moderate candidates earlier this month but put a socialist in the mayor’s seat in New York. They transformed into a bulwark of unity on Capitol Hill during the shutdown – only to collapse into infighting in a matter of hours.
They seemed to be creating a formidable governing obstacle to Mr. Trump but then provided him with the tools to claim victory in an extended political battle, allowing him to emerge as the more determined and unyielding bare-knuckle combatant.
The U.S. Senate on Monday approved a compromise that would end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, breaking a weeks-long stalemate that has disrupted food benefits for millions, left hundreds of thousands of federal workers unpaid and snarled air traffic.
Reuters
The resolution produced a situation reminiscent of Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s comment during the denouement of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: “We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”
So while the Democrats who blinked are claiming grudging credit for ending the short-term disruptions of the shutdown, others are arguing that the long-term goal of restoring the party’s role as protector of the poor and striving – a theme with roots in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal nearly a century ago but hijacked by Mr. Trump’s ascendancy over the past decade – has now been shattered.
Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Senate Democrat and one of those supporting the compromise, acknowledged in a vast understatement that “some of my friends are not happy.” But he argued, “Republicans have done everything in their power, while controlling both Congress and the presidency, to shut down the government rather than help Americans afford to go to the doctor and access cancer treatment or life-saving prescriptions,” adding in a statement, “This bill is not perfect, but it takes important steps to reduce their shutdown’s hurt.”
The measure was expected to be approved by the House of Representatives as soon as Tuesday. The House has been out of session during the lengthy Senate wrangling.
The consolation prize for the Democratic defectors – none of whom will face voters next year, and most of them from the party’s East Coast redoubt – was the promise of a vote on health care tax credits next month. That was an easy concession for Republicans. Their power on Capitol Hill makes it likely that, barring serious GOP defections – a possibility that cannot be measured today – such a measure will fail.
In one view, the vanguard of Democratic defectors has allowed the country to declare that the business of government will return to normal. In the other, they have made themselves vulnerable to charges that, in compromising with the Republicans, they have compromised their values.
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When parties are in disarray, they often cling to their heroes. One of them is John F. Kennedy, who in his Pulitzer-winning Profiles in Courage, from 1956, wrote: “We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves.”
Mr. Kennedy, at the time a senator from Massachusetts, understood the nuances involved in compromise. He acknowledge that “it is frequently the compromisers and conciliators who are faced with the severest tests of political courage as they oppose the extremist views of their constituents.”
In this case, both sides in the Democratic divide are portraying themselves as courageous.
But a good historical example that may provide perspective on this episode may be the British evacuation of Dunkirk in the spring of 1940. It provided a chance for the British to cut their losses on the European continent and regroup for a bigger, more consequential battle later – precisely the argument the Democratic defectors are offering now. At the same time, Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned: “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”