Democrats concede shutdown fight without health care win in hand

WASHINGTON —Democrats entered the shutdown seeking to renew tax credits to stave off insurance premium price hikes and to show voters they have the stomach for hardball negotiations in President Donald Trump’s Washington.

As the record-long shutdown neared its end more than a month later, they failed to achieve either goal.

A group of eight Democrats on Sunday broke with the rest of their party — including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — to vote with Republicans to advance a bill to re-open the government on the impasse’s 40th day.

That plan doesn’t include the extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies that Democrats staked their shutdown fight on. They did get a pledge for a separate vote on the health-care tax credits in the coming weeks, but the prospects of Democrats landing a win from that endeavor are far from certain.

The deal is likely to cause discord in a party that just days ago was celebrating a series of wins in mayoral and gubernatorial elections where voters responded to the party’s affordability messaging.

“I think it’s a terrible mistake,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said. “The American people want us to stand and fight for health care, and that’s what I believe we should do.” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries also criticized the plan to re-open the government, saying Democrats in his chamber wouldn’t support it.

Some Senate Democrats said those wins hardened their resolve to stay in the shutdown fight even as its effects worsened. But the quick moves by other members to cut a deal to end the impasse underscored Republicans’ grip on power in Washington.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat who helped negotiate the agreement to reopen government, said it had become clear Republicans were never going to consider health care subsidies while the government was shut down, and that waiting longer would only “prolong the pain Americans are feeling” with government operations limited.

The genesis of this showdown stems from blowback Schumer received in the spring after agreeing to back a Republican spending bill during the height of Elon Musk’s purge of federal workers through his Department of Government Efficiency effort.

Schumer at the time argued it was better to keep the government open, rather than give Musk an opening for more cuts. But outcry from the Democratic base was clear both then and now: they wanted their party to put up a fight.

Health care plan

Sunday’s deal demonstrates how difficult it is for Democrats to use what little leverage they have in a Republican-controlled Washington to push back on Trump’s agenda.

The promise of a future vote on health care tax credits is a deal Senate Republican leader John Thune offered weeks ago. Trump and GOP lawmakers repeatedly said they wouldn’t engage on health-care negotiations until after the shutdown ended.

“It wasn’t going to happen,” Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats said. He added that they spent “almost seven weeks of fruitless attempts” to get the Obamacare credits added to the spending bill.

There are some silver linings for Democrats: polls showed that the public blamed Republicans more than their own party for the congressional deadlock throughout the shutdown. The fight forced the Trump administration into a politically perilous argument pushing for states to withhold food aid for 42 million low-income Americans.

And the issue at the heart of their shutdown fight — renewing tax credits for Obamacare health coverage — remains a broadly popular issue as 24 million Americans face premium hikes that could mean paying hundreds of dollars more each month for insurance.

The vote on Obamacare subsidies Thune has promised “gives us a chance to put the Republicans to the test,” King said on MSNBC Monday morning.

Campaign issue

Democrats will now seek to use the upcoming vote they negotiated to launch a midterm campaign around health care, one of their strongest issues walking into the 2026 midterm elections.

If Republicans block an extension of the credits in a Senate floor vote, or refuse to take it up in the House, Democrats will make the case they are squarely to blame for skyrocketing health premium costs set to take effect at the start of next year.

Republicans now face pressure to come up with a solution to soaring health care premiums on their watch. And while the party was united on not negotiating on health care until the government reopened, they are deeply divided on how to address the issue.

Some want to extend the subsidies with mostly modest changes up front, while others want wholesale changes to the Affordable Care Act instead.

Failure on this issue can come with political cost. A backlash to Republican efforts to repeal the law helped power Democrats to retake the House in 2018, during Trump’s first term in office.

Pain pressures

Historically the party seeking to use a shutdown to leverage a policy win fails to do so, and ultimately caves without securing the sought changes. This time was no exception.

Democrats’ results mirror Trump’s own shutdown fight from his first term, when he held up government funding for 35 days in an attempt to extract more funding for a US-Mexico border wall only to emerge more than a month later with little to show for the standoff.

This shutdown’s concluding days also echoed the end to the 2018-19 government closure: negotiations got serious once air travel reached a breaking point.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ordered airlines to cancel flights to accommodate air traffic controller shortages as those employees increasingly stayed home as they worked weeks without pay.

More than 10,000 flights were delayed or canceled on Sunday as shutdown chaos, coupled with bad weather, snarled air travel and led to major bottlenecks at key travel hubs. Duffy warned that air travel could slow to a trickle just as millions of Americans prepared to board planes for Thanksgiving, one of the busiest travel period of the year.

The shutdown isn’t over yet. The Senate still needs to vote on the final measure. And the House, which Republican leaders have kept out of Washington since late September, will also have to come back to Washington and pass the bill without changes. After all that, Trump will need to sign it.

All told, it could take several days for the bill to wind its way through the legislative process before it becomes law.

And that means all the related shutdown effects — travel disruptions, delayed food aid and missing paychecks for federal workers will also persist until the deal is done.

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—With assistance from Jack Fitzpatrick, María Paula Mijares Torres, Maeve Sheehey and Jamie Tarabay.