It makes perfect sense to me that the Senate Democrats caved last night and voted to end the government shutdown with only the vaguest of promises from Senate Republicans: I am a lifelong Washington Wizards fan. I am accustomed to watching my team throw away a lead.
The vote is indefensible on the merits. The timing and politics are awful. This is the reason why practically no one who votes for the Democratic Party actually likes the Democratic Party.
And yet… I don’t ultimately think it will matter much in the grander scheme of things.
The U.S. political system is just about irreparably broken. The Democrats were “winning” the comms fight over the shutdown, but that’s a borderline-pyrrhic victory. Trump doesn’t care about his popularity, and he doesn’t care about Republican electoral losses a year from now, and he doesn’t care about mass suffering and loss. The guy went to the Supreme Court with a demand that he let him starve 40 million Americans. That’s both terrible substance and terrible optics!
And still the theory-of-change here is “well we hope that the electorate blames Trump and the Republicans for this, and keeps blaming them for another year, and then votes in such record numbers that they give the Democratic Party a slim majority in the House and Senate.”
That’s the best near-term theory-of-change available. But I keep looking around and thinking “yeah but that’s not nearly up to the task.”
The government shutdown was pretty much bound to end this way. At some point, the squishiest members of the Senate Democratic Caucus were going to to get too uncomfortable with all the pain and suffering for their constituents. They were going to ask “is this worth it for what we have demanded?” And they would eventually decide “nope, not anymore it isn’t.”
The alternate possible outcome would have been Senate Republicans perma-nuking the filibuster. I personally think that would have been good, because the filibuster is antidemocratic and bad. But that means the shutdown calculus has reached the point of “once enough holiday flights have been canceled, the Republicans will have to nuke the filibuster to reopen the government themselves. And then, haha, we will have… gotten them to enact procedural reforms that, if we all really wanted them, we could have just enacted ourselves the next time we have a majority.” And yeah, as embarrassing and frustrating as it is to watch the Democrats pause a footrace to tie their own shoelaces together, I can see why this was just about the point where the squishiest Senate Democrats said “we’ve lost the plot. We give up.”
What I’m trying to say is that this shutdown was always going to last until a handful of Senate Democrats got too uncomfortable and caved. Caving right now is indefensible. But it also would have been indefensible two months from now, after people starved and the airports mostly shut down and 60+% of the country was blaming Trump but he still didn’t notice because his brain is mostly soup at this point.
Sure, sign me up to primary basically every member of the Democratic Senate leadership. It would be nice to have a Democratic Party that stands for its commitments and isn’t always a news cycle away from folding.
But the politics of the 2026 election (and beyond) will be on basically the same trajectory with the government reopened as it would’ve been if the shutdown continued indefinitely.
We’re looking at a recession combined with runaway inflation. Either the AI companies are going to deliver unto us their digital god within the next 24 months or else the AI bubble is going to burst, and AI capital expenditures + stock market hype is basically the only thing keeping the economy upright.
Trump is going to keep sending masked goons to abduct anyone who looks like the wrong type of American to them. FEMA and the FDA and NHS and the CDC are so understaffed that avoiding catastrophes will be like dancing between raindrops. Health insurance premiums are going to skyrocket, and the Republican policy response is going to be some version of “shut up. No they aren’t.”
And meanwhile they’ll keep trying to gerrymander their way to a House majority, keep relying on their Supreme Court majority to reinterpret the constitution to mean whatever Republicans need it to mean this morning, and keep sending occupation forces into Democratic-run cities.
The shutdown wasn’t hampering Trump’s illegal actions, because he just decided that the parts of the government that he cared about (the new ballroom, mostly, it seems) were still operational. And his court majority was letting him do it.
All of that is bad. All of it will keep getting worse. And the public will continue to hate it. That’s equally true regardless of the shutdown.
So it would be nice if the Senate Democrats would stop scoring own-goals. It would be cool if the party-in-opposition wasn’t such a goddamn embarrassment all the time.
But the scale of the shutdown was never on par with the scale of the damage. It wasn’t up to the task. Nothing, in the very-near-term, will be. And on the longer timescale — the timescale it will take to repair the damage and enact democracy reforms — I pretty much expect this to become a forgettable episode.
Keep up the fight, even when our elected leaders won’t. We’re going to be in this for a long, long time.