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Coffee Break: Senate Dems Throw Teetering Trump a Lifeline

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Senate Democrats threw a teetering Trump administration a lifeline by folding on the U.S. government shutdown.

The move has divided the national Democratic party and taken the spotlight off a teetering Trump administration’s troubles.

Eight Senators abandoned the Democratic caucus to join Republicans voting to reopen the government “in exchange for a couple of months of government funding and a vote on healthcare that they are bound to lose.”

Schumer in Trouble With the Base

Coming on the heels of big electoral wins for Democrats in last week’s elections, this has infuriated the party’s grassroots base and even motivated a few House Democrats to call for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to resign.

Notable exceptions include House Minority Leader “AIPAC Shakur” Hakeem Jefferies and erstwhile progressive Bernie Sanders.

Despite not being one of the 8 Senators who voted with the Republicans to end the shutdown, Schumer is being blasted over the deal.

Rotating Villain Gambit No Longer Working

That’s because more and more Americans are hip to what Glenn Greenwald labeled the “rotating villain” scam whereby a conservative senate Democrat publicly opposes the party’s key objectives.

This role has been played in previous sessions by Joe Lieberman, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sinema, but has now been enthusiastically taken up by progressive apostate John Fetterman.

Fetterman (PA) was joined by fellow Dems Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Dick Durbin (IL), Tim Kaine (VA), Maggie Hassan (NH), Jacky Rosen (NV), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), and independent Angus King (ME).

Dems Can’t Keep Kayfabe

Despite MSNBC MS NOW talking heads like Symone Sanders playing stupid as hard as they can, there’s just no sheltering Schumer.

One of the 8, Tim Kaine, broke kayfabe telling a CNBC reporter, “I can tell you this, there were a lot more than 8 that were really happy that the 8 of us voted them the way we did. But I’m not going to put words in anybody’s mouth.”

Shaheen also spilled the beans, saying, “we kept leadership informed throughout.

More damning for Schumer, Robert Kuttner reported:

It has been widely assumed that the group of eight mostly centrist Senate Democrats, who have been looking to broker a hollow deal on Republican terms, were freelancing. In fact, they were acting with the express approval of Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and were reporting to him daily.

At Thursday’s meeting, they told their caucus colleagues that they now had ten votes to reopen the government in exchange for no real Republican concessions. At that, much of the rest of the caucus went ballistic, and some of the supposed ten said that, in fact, they were not willing to vote for any such deal.

The leaders of the proposed Democratic cave-in, Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, both of New Hampshire, and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, then backed down. Only after that did Schumer go public with his proposal to reopen the government in exchange for a one-year extension of the ACA subsidies, along with a bipartisan commission to figure out a long-term solution.
…
The mystery is why Schumer keeps flirting with capitulation in exchange for nothing. Democrats have the political momentum, Republicans are divided, and a majority of voters blame Republicans for the shutdown.

Jeet Heer ripped Schumer in The Nation:

Even though he negotiated the deal, he himself said on Sunday that he won’t vote for it. He clearly prefers to let other Democrats take the fall.

Heer also cites historian Aaron Astor who tweeted,

For Dems, this one will wreck Schumer. But it will raise salience of health care affordability for next November if no ACA subsidy passes. After last Tuesday, Dems know that affordability is THE big issue that will help in 2026, just as it crushed Dems in 2024. GOP has never put forth a real alternative to the ACA so without subsidies, they’ll own major premium increases, whether they like it or not. But Schumer has done a terrible job messaging any of this and he is absolutely loathed by the Dem base now.

Schumer may have torched his own political career, but as I learned in 2006 when I had an inside view of the Democratic party’s reaction to Joe Lieberman losing his 2006 primary, there are more important things to a modern politician than his or her electoral prospects.

Money and power matter to these people. Serving their constituents is not all that high on the list.

As Always, Follow the Money

Despite the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart playing along and blaming Dem “incompetence,” historian Nate Holdren was more accurate when he wrote, “it’s closer to a boxer taking a dive because for behind-the-scenes reasons there’s more money in losing the match.”

David Sirota’s The Lever notes that restaurant and food industry lobbyists got language inserted into the emergency spending bill that “eliminates rules designed to prevent food contamination and foodborne illnesses at farms and restaurants” and that three of the Dem line-crossers (Kaine, Rosen, and Durbin) received a combined $17,000 from that lobby.

The Lever also reported that the airlines, who have been brutalized by the shutdown, have given $842,500 to seven of the caucus-defying Dems since 2019 and:

$218,000 — representing a sizable 10 percent of the industry’s election cycle PAC spending — has gone to Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) since 2019. Rosen has counted airlines as one of her top industry donors last election cycle… right behind health care and insurance.

But Schumer may have been fighting to protect an even bigger prize: the Senate filibuster which raises the number of Senators needed to pass a bill from a simple majority to a super majority of 60.

Did Schumer Save the Sacred Filibuster?

Another historian, Keith Orejel angrily tweeted, “Let’s be frank. The Democrats sold us all out on healthcare to protect the filibuster because when they get back into power they don’t want to actually be expected to implement serious change.”

Whatever his motives, Schumer is extremely vulnerable and likely in his last term, which has three years left. His New York Senate seat appears to be Congressional Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ for the taking.

Schumer’s noble sacrifice may go down in the annals of centrist legend because the filibuster was definitely in trouble, with a teetering Trump pushing hard to end it, per Punchbowl News:

NEWS — INSIDE THE ROOM per multiple GOP senators…

After reporters were kicked out, Trump said the election results showed that the shutdown has been “worse for us than for them” & that R’s “are getting killed.”

Trump said the GOP will become a “dead party” if they don’t nuke the filibuster.

Trump got into it with Lindsey Graham after Graham tried to make the point that they can still use reconciliation to pass legislation with a simple majority

Trump snapped at Graham: “Lindsey, you and I both know that there’s so much you can’t do with reconciliation…”

Teetering Trump Team Celebrates

For their part the teetering Trump administration is thrilled with the outcome, telling Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo:

The Trump White House, for its part, is cackling – sometimes literally – about the turn of events. Two White House officials, and two other Trump advisers, could barely contain their giddiness when asked by Zeteo about the latest instance of the Democratic elite capitulating to Trump. Multiple Trump aides and allies kept gratuitously using terms such as “losers” and “pussies” as they reveled in the relief from a shutdown that even President Trump acknowledged was getting Republicans “killed” politically.

Teetering Trump Really Is Teetering

And if you’re tired of me writing “teetering Trump” without backing it up, let’s look at some polling on the shutdown and recent election results:

The failure to renew Obamacare subsidies also disproportionately impacts Trump voters:

Trump’s support is cratering with the younger voters who put him over the top in 2024:

Schumer’s capitulation is virtually the only good news Trump has had in the past week.

Before we dive into the survey of Trump’s many woes, just check this reporting on the “process” behind his pathetic 50 year mortgage idea:

This is the same Bill Pulte that Bessant threatened to punch in the face in September.

Check these headlines:

The video from the Duran is of special interest as both they and their guest Robert Barnes are MAGA-sympathetic (at a minimum) and they all agree that Trump has lost touch with is base, is in thrall to establishment types like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and has completely lost the plot on both domestic and foreign policy.

Barnes also compares Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files early this summer to Biden’s disastrous mishandling of (the long overdue) American withdrawal from Afghanistan: the pivot moment when things went wrong for the administration.

Trump is doing a fine job of destroying his own administration, but rather than throwing him an anvil, Schumer and status quo Senate Democrats have thrown teetering Trump a lifeline.

Those who wish to overthrow Trump also must overthrow the Democratic centrists who enable him.

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3 comments

  1. Carolinian

    Thanks. In Links I linked a Caitlin Johnstone column using statements from a onetime Israeli asserting that an almost universal attitude in that country is to skirt the rules until someone tells them to stop. And so, much of Trump’s agenda is likely to be rolled back if the Dems and most especially the public stand up to the bully. Nobody likes an ***hole.

    Well maybe some do but as Adlai said when told the smart people were all for him: “I need a majority.”

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  2. taunger

    Seth Moulton (MA-6) is angling for Markey’s seat, which drives me nuts. Moulton sucks, but right now I think Markey sucks more for hanging onto the seat rather than finding a good, younger pol to endorse to take it. Instead, he’s fighting to hang on at 167 years old against a right wing dem replacment. This shouldn’t happen

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  3. Partyless poster

    I’ll never understand why liberals can’t get it through their heads that the democrat party is fake opposition. I’ve had family members who even read NC regularly still tell me to vote blue!
    How much evidence do you need, from Pelosi’s “we need a strong republican party” to Harris rehabilitating the Cheneys to the constant calls to cross the aisle when Republicans never do.
    No real progress will ever happen as long as we have 2 republican parties.
    I’ve gotten to the point where I think being against the duopoly is actually more important than the left-right divide, people need to realize both parties only serve the rich and start supporting 3rd parties now.
    Its either that or violent revolution.

    Reply ↓

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