CHUCK DEVORE: Democrats’ Shutdown Surrender A Gift To Trump And Congressional Republicans

The longest government shutdown in American history, 40 days of furloughed feds and finger-pointing, whimpered to an end Sunday night. Eight Senate Democrats, weary of their own party’s lack of a credible path to victory, crossed the aisle to hand Republicans a clean win, invoking cloture on a House funding bill by the slimmest of margins: 60-40.

What isn’t in the bill? Obamacare subsidy extensions and a restoration of health care subsidies for illegal aliens—the ostensible reason for the shutdown. Rather, the bill was just a straight-up funding for military construction, the Department of Agriculture, and the legislative branch through Sept. 30, 2026, with the rest of the bloated bureaucracy limping along to Jan. 30, with federal workers getting backpay, in many cases, for work not done.

Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine said of the marathon effort to leverage policy gains from majority Republicans that “The evidence… is almost seven weeks of fruitless attempts to make that happen. Would it change in a week? Or another week? Or after Thanksgiving? There’s no evidence that it would.”

Translation: Democrats blinked because they didn’t have a viable plan.

The list of defectors, except for Democratic Senate Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, reads like a roll call of battleground-state survivors: Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and King.

Durbin’s main claim was that the bill “would reverse the mass firings the Trump Administration ordered throughout the shutdown”—firings that were largely seen as a White House pressure tactic. Evidentially, it worked.

Of course, the Democrats’ ascendant progressive left wing was apoplectic. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts thundered on X that the deal “does nothing to make health care more affordable,” labeling it a “mistake” in a health care “emergency.” She might have said, “of our own making” but that would require an admission of guilt that Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, wasn’t about affordability or care.