The Democratic Shutdown Capitulation: A Perfect and Unnecessary Failure  

“A Government Shutdown Looms. Prepare For Democrats to Disappoint.” That’s what I wrote two months ago. And here we are.  

That an opposition party-driven shutdown failed to secure its primary demands is not unusual. In fact, as I’ve repeatedly emphasized, shutdowns have a perfect record of failure. In this case, the asks were a guaranteed extension of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies and recission-proof agreements on spending levels. 

But I wasn’t expecting a rogue Democratic faction to cave in such a politically illogical fashion when they were on the cusp of proving doubters like me wrong.  

In September, I sketched out the typical progression of events in a shutdown: “Public attention shifts to how shutdowns hurt average Americans and how one political party is willing to harm constituents to play political games. Once public opinion quickly turns, the shutdown agitators invariably realize the shutdown failed to provide negotiating leverage and eventually cave.” 

The current federal government shutdown did not follow the same pattern because of President Donald Trump’s cruel sociopathy. He took a Democratic-provoked shutdown and made it his own, gleefully piling on layoffs of federal workers and needlessly cutting off food assistance to impoverished families, even appealing to the Supreme Court to keep the cutoff of SNAP benefits going when lower courts gave him cause to restore the flow of food to the needy.  

Public opinion turned … against Republicans. Polls showed the public laying most of the blame on the GOP. On Election Day, Democrats slayed up and down the ballot—from the gubernatorial battles in New Jersey and Virginia to the Bucks County, Pennsylvania district attorney race to the Georgia Public Service Commission contests. As of Friday, the Democratic lead in the generic congressional ballot stood at its widest point this year, at 4.1 percentage points. 

In a rare admission of political weakness, Trump acknowledged Wednesday morning after the Republican electoral defeats, “The shutdown was a big factor, negative for the Republicans … We must get the government back open soon. And really, immediately.”  

Still wanting to avoid bartering with Democrats, Trump pushed Senate Republicans to junk the filibuster. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the South Dakota Republican, said, “the votes aren’t there” to do it, reflecting his conference’s rare resistance to a Trump request. North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, who is declining to run for reelection next year after sparring with the president, declared, “With metaphysical certainty, this Congress is not going to nuke the filibuster, period, full stop.” Once again, Trump tacitly acknowledged his hand with Senate Republicans regarding the filibuster in a Wednesday Fox News interview: “Do I want to lose my relationship with those Republicans that have been very good to me for a long period of time … Do you ever have people that are wrong, but you can’t convince them? So do you destroy your whole relationship with them or not?” 

Democrats could not have scripted this any better. They instigated the shutdown, yet Trump took the blame for it. Trump admitted the shutdown had damaged his party at the ballot box. And his one path to ending it without Democrats was cut off by his Senate allies.  

So why would Senator Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats, make this argument to justify surrender? King told reporters on Sunday: 

The question before us, before those of us here who decided to vote yes tonight, the question was, does the shutdown further the goal of achieving some needed support for the extension of the tax credits? Our judgment was that it will not produce that result. And the evidence for that is almost seven weeks of fruitless attempts to make that happen. Would it change in a week or another week, or after Thanksgiving or Christmas? And there’s no evidence that it would. 

Yes, there is evidence that it would: Trump’s admission that the shutdown was hurting Republicans and his inability to secure an end to the shutdown on a party-line vote.  

The only way out of the shutdown was a bipartisan deal, and Democrats had achieved something incredibly rare in a shutdown showdown: opposition party leverage.  

Why did King and the Invertebrate Eight sacrifice that leverage for a deal that forfeited their main Democratic demands?  

The mere hint of losing the filibuster may have caused panic among Senate institutionalists. Karen Tumulty, the veteran Beltway reporter at The Washington Post, said on X, “This was all about the filibuster.” Her former Post colleague Benjy Sarlin added, “D’s seem divided 80-20 between the ‘Go ahead, make my day’ caucus on ditching the filibuster and the 20 who cut a deal as soon as R’s put it on the table.” Republicans had not actually put it on the table, but the surrendering Democrats may have feared the worst anyway. 

Democrats were also susceptible to the plight of federal workers and their families who were experiencing real hardships. When the president of the American Federation of Government Employees union called for “reopen[ing] the government immediately under a clean continuing resolution that allows continued debate on larger issues,” Senator Dick Durbin said the statement “has a lot of impact” and because “they’re our friends, we take them seriously.” 

Of course, it’s honorable for Durbin and other Democrats to care about our cherished civil servants. The deal rescinds the wave of pink slips issued last month. However, nothing in this deal would protect their jobs beyond the current fiscal year.  

Otherwise, all they got was a promise to schedule a vote on renewal of expiring health insurance subsidies—with no assurance of passage. Any funding promises, such as the agreement’s full funding of the General Accountability Office watchdog unit, could still be subject to future recissions. And under the agreement funding for most government agencies will run out again at the end of January, requiring another of negotiations to finish out the fiscal year. 

I tend to disagree with the presumption that “timid” Democrats always bring a spork to a gunfight. But that’s what this looks like. Matthew Yglesias spills that “a lot of the people I’ve spoken to, both in Congress and in the policy community, were genuinely very stressed out about the harm the shutdown was doing to the country, including lost wages and disrupted air travel,” and “lots of them didn’t really believe their own spin. The public blamed Trump, but [Democrats] blamed themselves and felt bad.” They shouldn’t have. Trump was purposefully making the shutdown hurt as many people as possible. And little in this deal is going to prevent him from inflicting further harm.  

I was always deeply skeptical that Democrats could extract significant policy concessions from a shutdown, as it’s never happened before. But my counsel to Democrats was to wash their hands of the appropriations process and tell Republicans—who had already negated past spending agreements with recissions and openly disparaged bipartisan appropriations deals—it’s their problem to solve. Then they could either watch Republicans junk the filibuster or beg for Democratic help on Democratic terms. Walking away from the table would have avoided this debacle, in which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer entered a high-stakes battle without full commitment from his caucus. 

Schumer may not be to blame for Quisling rump, but as former House Speaker John Boehner—who led an infamously unruly band of Republicans and eventually quit before being ousted—liked to say, “A leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.” Or, in other words, not much of a leader.  

Still, replacing Schumer wouldn’t suddenly make the Senate Democratic Caucus less squishy. And to quote another problematic Republican, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” And the Democratic army—a massive tent spanning from Zohran Mamdani to Abigail Spanberger—had a great Election Day last week. As bad and as unnecessary as this week’s capitulation was, the frustrations among Democrats are likely to be forgotten by the midterms.