What Happens When One Party Simply Does Not Care About People?
My column on Tuesday decried the capitulation by eight Senate Democrats that ended the government shutdown earlier this week. Those senators are Catherine Cortez Masto, Dick Durbin, John Fetterman, Maggie Hassan, Tim Kaine, Angus King, Jackie Rosen, and Jeanne Shaheen. What do they all have in common? I wrote this:
To be clear, while the media immediately labeled this group of turncoats the Senate's "moderates," that is only accurate in the sense that these eight are among a very large group of Democratic senators who are in no way progressive. (Well, one of the eight was John Fetterman, who is now beyond any coherent political description.) That is, it is not the Democratic moderates who caved. Some of them did. Among those who did not wave the white flag were Amy Klobuchar, Chris Coons, Michael Bennet, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jeff Merkley, and Elissa Slotkin. I could have listed dozens more, but the point is that it is not the Sanders/Warren "wing" of the Senate versus the poor, beleaguered middle-of-the-road punching bags. Even most of the people whose very DNA screams "Stand for nothing!" stood for this shutdown.
But did they? After all, in a contrivance obviously designed to protect him from a reprise of the fierce criticism that he received back in February, one of the nay votes was reserved for Chuck Schumer. (For what it might be worth, I still think that Schumer was on the right side of the argument earlier this year. That, however, was in a very different context. Things change. Schumer doesn't.) And, as many people have by now pointed out, the hateful eight included no one who is up for reelection next year. In fact, some had already announced their retirements, making them even less accountable.
My "not all moderates caved" point, therefore, was at best an example of mindlessly adopting the conventional framing. There is every reason to believe that all but a handful of Senate Democrats could have been convinced to join the counter-shutdown, if their votes had been needed. Even so, I am glad that I included that recitation of facts in my column, because there is a more important point about the way that the rogue senators are being misleadingly portrayed. Again, however, I emphasize that I followed along and called them moderates, which feeds a false narrative. Mea culpa.
Why is that a false narrative? Moderation is not the salient feature here. Saying that the people who have given Trump and the Republicans a huge win are moderates would be like saying that "eight Democrats whose last names begin with letters between C and S voted with Republicans," or maybe "a group of senators whose net worth is between $2 million and $200 million boosted Donald Trump's political fortunes." The point is that being politically moderate has almost as little to do with joining Republicans in this situation as Democratic senators' Body Mass Indices or their star signs do in explaining their decision. The leadership of the party of capitulation wanted what it wanted, and its caucus in the US Senate includes dozens of interchangeable drones who would have gone along.
To be clear, it is not as though the Democrats' roster outside of the US Senate is packed with visionary leaders, either. In its latest "Weekly Review," Harper's included this nugget: “The more you push me, the more I’m not going to do what you want,” said the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, in response to a public outcry to tax the rich.28" (Note that here and below, the quotes from Harper's include the original footnote numbers, which contain embedded links.)
Yes, the elected governor of the Empire State just revealed publicly that she has the mindset of a contrary toddler, unwilling to respond to the popular will -- you know, democracy and all that -- because being asked repeatedly to change her mind pisses her off. And it is important to recall that Hochul was one of the least insane establishment Democrats when it came to last week's election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City's next mayor. But the larger message is that the party's bigwigs are completely out of touch -- stubbornly and even defiantly so.
Harper's also, however, helpfully reminded us that the Republicans are still even more unhinged, offering these tidbits: "The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on New Yorkers moving to Texas after the mayoral elections; and Trump promised at least $2,000 to each American, citing funds earned from tariff revenues.29 30 " and "'God just made the barred owl a better hunter,' said the Louisiana senator John Kennedy. 'The Department of the Interior, in its infinite wisdom, has come up with DEI for owls.'44."
These snippets are merely the latest reminders that American politicians are by no means a collection of towering intellects, principled leaders, or tactical masterminds. Happily, Dorf on Law's readers sometimes come to the rescue, and I received an insightful email from a longtime reader after I published Tuesday's column. He observed that the excuse offered by the defectors that they needed to "save" the filibuster was silly, because "at any time, the Republicans can eliminate the filibuster for no reason other than their majority. Caving did not save the filibuster forever, not even to the end of the year."
Sure enough, Kaine wrote a completely predictable and unpersuasive defense of his vote in today's New York Times, which included fretting that Republicans could end the filibuster and "pass a government funding bill with no Democratic votes, a dangerous consolidation of one-party rule." That is his concern about the consolidation of one-party rule? Even so, Senate "institutionalists" love the idea that they are standing behind hoary practices that make their chamber unique, so of course they buckled and cited the filibuster as an excuse for doing so.
More to the larger political point, my correspondent concluded with this observation:
Is it possible a majority of the Democratic caucus lost their will to see more hunger, or planes falling out of the sky? Yes, but that is why the Republicans win—because the Democrats to do not have the savvy or the will to play on this playground. Indeed, they did not even play the shutdown well. They should have been in town halls and on every local TV station with people who use Obamacare and cannot pay for it now and will go uninsured. They should have run tons of ads, hit every talk show imaginable to drive the point. But they did not, because they just are not that good right now at politics, sad to say.
The second half of that paragraph needs no elaboration. It is clearly true, and it is sad that Democrats did not follow that strategy. The first half, however, raises an issue that I have been mulling over for quite some time. I have long used the term "squeal point" to describe what is sometimes formally called the "reservation point" in negotiations. No matter the label, the idea is that negotiations that successfully culminate in contractual agreements can only happen when the highest price that a buyer would be willing to pay is greater than the lowest price that a seller would be willing to accept. When that is true, unless something goes awry, negotiating will result in an agreement that sets the price somewhere between the two squeal points.
The Republicans during the shutdown revealed that they have no squeal point, when it comes to what they would be willing to accept to end a shutdown. That is, the Democrats wanted them to offer something, and Republicans said, "No, we're good where things are." Would Republicans accept everything except a single peppercorn, maybe? Well, they agreed to hold a vote on health care subsidies, but that is an empty promise and might not even be honored. They agreed to "reinstate federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown through reductions in force, or RIFs [and added] language barring future mass firings for the duration of the resolution that keeps the government open through January." And they supposedly made it so that "food stamps can’t be used as leverage in any funding fight in the coming months."
Except that none of that is safe from Trump and can be superseded by future Republican funding bills that could negate anything and everything that those Democrats thought they accomplished earlier this week.
We are no longer dealing with two parties that care about people. In fact, it has been clear for years that Republicans are the party of non-compassionate conservatism, or as I titled a Dorf on Law column almost four years ago, we now have "Clarity: One of Our Parties Truly Does Want to Take from the Poor and Give to the Rich."
Ivy League universities have agreed to deals with the Trump Administration that could be torn up at any time, in some cases not even receiving the immediate benefits for which they negotiated, and in any case simply (as Professor Dorf put it a few months ago) creating incentives for more hostage-taking.
In the current political context, getting next to nothing on paper and knowing that it could end up being literally nothing in reality is insane. But as my correspondent pointed out, it is possible that some Democrats saw immediate harm and could not resist doing whatever it took to end or mitigate the pain that Republicans have been gleefully inflicting on vulnerable people. When I wrote back in September that the Democrats' only play in the shutdown fight was to "win the politics," I meant precisely this: Republicans will take hostages and count on Democrats to have a heart. And the result is that more people will soon be harmed.
I do not discount the relief that the current hostages (federal workers, hungry people) will surely be feeling right now. If only there were reason to believe that they will not be replaced by still more unlucky people -- or even to believe that they themselves will not be taken hostage again. And the Democratic Senators who rewarded Republicans for their sociopathy will surely say that capitulation was the pragmatic move. What were they going to do? Think more than one step ahead?
- Neil H. Buchanan