On Wednesday night, US President Donald Trump signed legislation ending the longest federal government shutdown in American history. It was a perplexing end to a strange saga. Both the Republican and Democratic parties gambled, and their perspicacity will be tested against reality – and each other – primarily in next November’s midterm vote.
Mr Trump and his Republicans showed no signs of wearying from the confrontation after 38 days of growing pain, primarily among constituencies Democrats either already command or believe rightly belong to them. Eight Democratic senators broke ranks through a deal with Republicans that gave them very little, including on the supposedly central issue of health care.
It’s especially puzzling because the party appeared to be winning the political battle, with key national polls showing that Americans blamed Mr Trump and Republicans for the shutdown. And the compromise came in the wake of an astonishingly comprehensive, indeed virtually total, Democratic sweep in elections around the country last week. Democrats won where they were presumed to have little chance and prevailed by overwhelming margins where they seemed likely to win. There was literally nothing providing any consolation to Republicans in the outcome.
This seemed to connect with polling data showing Mr Trump sinking rapidly below the 40 per cent approval mark and into the dangerous terrain of the 30s. There was every indication, then, that the political headwinds favoured Democrats, and that they are well-positioned to hold the House of Representatives and maybe even gain a Senate majority, which was until recently widely assumed to be unattainable, next November.
Everything seemed to be going well for them. So why did eight of their senators accept a seemingly terrible deal from Republicans and throw a lifeline to Mr Trump, who appeared to be slowly sinking below the political waves?
The reasons are predictably complex and multi-layered. One of the most significant is that the Democratic senators in question, and many in their party, were astonished at how nonchalant Mr Trump was about the impact the government shutdown was having on many Americans.
He was funding some of his most cherished policies, including immigration enforcement and pay for the military, in ways that are arguably extraconstitutional, if not worse, and he did not seem to care at all about damage to the interests and pocketbooks of millions of ordinary citizens.
Congressional Republicans were evidently either similarly unbothered or, in many cases, intimidated by the White House and party leaders from voicing any opposition. So the shutdown was only going to get worse, as evinced by growing chaos at airports where air traffic control officials were lacking to meet heavy demand. That was set to get much worse in the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, the busiest travel season of the year in the US.
Many Democrats thought Mr Trump was setting himself up for a deeper political disaster by appearing not to care about catastrophic travel meltdowns over the cherished holiday. But others seemed to doubt they could continue to avoid their own share of political backlash and, more importantly, to be genuinely distressed and dismayed over the impact the shutdown was having.
It’s particularly strange that the Democratic Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, offered Republicans an inexplicable compromise over existing health subsidies. These subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year – threatening the access to health care for three million to five million Americans – and many Republicans who have never reconciled themselves to former president Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms still hope to badly damage the programme, if not kill it, by doing away with them.
Democrats have been promised a vote on the issue in December, but not a positive outcome. They did manage to use the shutdown to focus national attention on the healthcare issue, along with other questions of “affordability” that seem to profoundly vex Mr Trump. He is continuing to blame all economic woes in the country on his predecessor, Joe Biden, but such arguments about the “other guy” typically expire after six months or so into a presidential term. Mr Trump is well into month 11, and these protestations ring exceedingly hollow.
But the federal funding bill only extends the issue until late January, so Americans may find themselves back in the same predicament in a few short weeks. If Democrats hope to use the healthcare issue against Mr Trump in the midterm elections, he may yet provide them every opportunity to do that.
Some may quietly be hoping so. They may even be cynically rooting for Republicans, at Mr Trump’s vociferous behest, to finally do away with the Senate filibuster rule that requires most legislation to be supported by a supermajority of 60 senators out of 100, rather than a simple majority vote. Democrats have often pointed to the filibuster as one of the more annoying counter-democratic features of the American system, even though it has been useful to both sides and is merely a Senate rule that has nothing to do with the Constitution or the underlying political system.
The eight Democratic senators who broke ranks this week may not all be cynical enough to hope that Republicans kill healthcare subsidies and do away with the filibuster in coming weeks and months. But emerging from the midterms with new majorities in both houses of Congress and no more filibuster limitation in the Senate would be a remarkably strong comeback after the devastation of the last general election. And last week’s election results certainly seem to suggest that’s entirely possible.
The most obvious objection to the compromise in the Senate is that the eight senators and their supporters are continuing to treat the current US political moment as a normal one, with standard calculations still fully valid. But the moment is not a normal one, their critics note. Instead, Mr Trump is clearly moving towards a strongman system and away from both democratic checks and balances and the rule of law that have traditionally defined the US constitutional order.
If rank-and-file Democrats, and most American voters, want to see their party uniting against what they view as an unconscionable series of usurpations and overreaches that threaten fundamental political norms and protections, then calculations about healthcare subsidies will be profoundly unconvincing.
Perhaps the best news for Democrats is that nothing is resolved, everything is still in play, and their primary adversary still appears to be sinking under the weight of his own miscalculations.
