The pointless government shutdown is over — but Schumer and Dems’ psychodrama only just getting started

Our long national nightmare is over, but the Democratic psychodrama isn’t.

The longest shutdown in US history — with increasing pain points across the country, whether among travelers or SNAP recipients — is ending, while the Democratic recriminations are just getting started.

“It’s complete BS,” was a relatively mild take on the deal from one congressional progressive.

As a rule of thumb, government shutdowns are bootless exercises. They rarely work because the party that causes the shutdown, thinking that it will provide leverage, invariably gets blamed for the shutdown and then — surprise! — ends up in a worse position than where it began.

Democrats managed to escape the worst political fallout from their weeks-long refusal to fund the government. Otherwise, their tactic failed, and predictably so.

No Democratic senators have been seen wearing T-shirts saying, “I caused disruption and heartache for millions, and all I got was a meaningless promise for a lousy vote,” but they would be apt.

The shutdown was supposedly all about securing more Obamacare subsidies. This connection was entirely arbitrary, though. At the beginning of the shutdown, the Democrats spun the wheel and the bouncing ball landed on “health care.”

They just as easily could have picked immigration, climate, or LGBTQIA+ policy as the reason they wanted a shutdown. The advantage of health care is that it’s the one issue where Democrats still have a significant advantage.

They maintained it was it so imperative that Republicans extend forever Obamacare subsidies first passed in 2021 and then re-upped in 2022 under Joe Biden — without a single Republican vote either time — that it was worth shutting down the government over.

Republicans have sounded defensive about health care during the fight, but the Democratic demand was so extravagant, and the bad faith so obvious, that the GOP was never going to cave.

Sure enough, the GOP held firm, and as the shutdown began to bite, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reduced the ask to a one-year extension of the subsidies.

When that went nowhere, a band of relatively moderate Democratic senators broke ranks to support a deal for a mere Senate vote on continued subsidies. Not a guarantee of passage. Not even a promise of a vote in both houses of Congress. No, just a Senate vote on a Democratic priority that will probably fail.

No wonder progressives are livid, but when isn’t that the case? In the Trump years, to be progressive is to constantly feel an implacable sense of impotence and rage. This was the real reason for the shutdown — it was a readily available instrument for expressing an unreasoning hatred of Donald Trump.

Democrats believed that the moment, as Otter famously said in the movie “Animal House,” required a “stupid and futile gesture,” and acted accordingly.

On top of this, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer desperately wanted to appease the Democratic base. The aging New Yorker is so vulnerable to a potential primary challenge from progressive heartthrob Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that he must look to her now the way a wounded wildebeest does to a hungry lion.

Schumer had MSNBC viewers burning him in effigy earlier in the year when he refused to shut down the government. He didn’t want to make that mistake again, but the flaw in his plan was that it only meant delaying the inevitable.

Rather then infuriating their base by not shutting down the government, Democrats have infuriated their base by moving to re-open the government a few weeks after shutting it down. Progressives are still calling for Schumer’s head, even though he theoretically opposes the deal.

Most congressional Democrats surely realize that it would be unsustainable to continue to keep the government closed. Still, they aren’t going to let that get in the way of their public posturing. They are both glad that people on their side are willing to do the right thing by voting to fund the government, and glad that these other people—not them—are taking the fall for it.

Notably, presumptive 2028 presidential hopefuls Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg opposed the deal, knowing that maximal opposition to Trump is the price for entry in Democratic primary politics.

In short, the government shutdown may have been pointless and dumb, but there is much more where that came from.