By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
Our long national nightmare is over, but the Democratic
psychodrama isn’t.
The longest shutdown in U.S. history — with increasing pain points across the
country, especially among travelers — 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 don’t 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, the 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. The advantage of health care is that
it’s the one issue where Democrats still have a significant advantage.
They maintained it was 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 — that it was worth
shutting down the government over.
Republicans have sounded defensive about health care, but
the Democratic demand was so extravagant, and the bad faith so obvious, that
the GOP wasn’t 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 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 that will probably fail.
No wonder progressives are livid, but isn’t that always
the case? In the Trump years, to be progressive is to feel an implacable sense
of impotence and rage. This was the real reason for the shutdown — it was a way
to give vent to an unreasoning hatred of Donald Trump.
Democrats believed that the moment, as Otter famously
said in Animal House, required a “futile and stupid gesture,” and acted
accordingly.
On top of this, 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 as 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 than infuriating their base by not shutting down
the government, Democrats have infuriated their base by reopening the
government.
Most congressional Democrats 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 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 of 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.
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