Hard Heart/Soft Heart
40 Days of Shutdown Pain For Nothing
Two days ago, we were in for a grim November. Families who depend on SNAP would continue to go hungry as the Trump administration withheld their benefits and attempted to claw back money already distributed. Federal workers would continue to work without pay, or be furloughed, or be fired. Our airports would continue to grind to a halt just in time for one of the busiest travel weeks of the year. All these things were the fault of the Democrats— or at least that's what federal government websites all (illegally) told the American people.
But the people disagreed. They handed the Democrats victory after unprecedented victory last Tuesday, and not just high profile races either—they swept everything from Mayor of New York to rural county commissioners across the country. Trump’s approval rating has trended steadily downward since the shutdown began, but fell off a cliff on November 1st when SNAP benefits failed to arrive. He’s not just at his lowest point this term, he’s nearly two points lower than his previous low point.
Things could not have been going better for the Democrats, which I assume made them deeply uncomfortable. Or maybe they simply couldn't wrap their heads around it. For the last decade, pundits and the consultant class have preached the gospel of Moderation and Reaching Across the Aisle. Real Americans, we were told, are terminally turned off by anything left of center. And now, after years of following that advice and going down in flames, the party was suddenly succeeding by doing the exact opposite. We were drawing lines in the sand, refusing to back down, running a Muslim democratic socialist who supports trans rights—and winning. Surely this must be some kind of mistake. Surely it would all come crashing down around them if they didn’t go back to the old ways as quickly as possible.
And so, for this reason or some other one, eight moderates decided this was the time to surrender—now, immediately, before people got the wrong idea about the Democratic Party standing for something.
On Sunday night, these moderates joined with Republicans to move the previously unacceptable budget bill to the Senate floor. That bill passed the Senate last night and will now go to the House for consideration. Thomas Massie will vote no, as he always does, as will House Democrats led by an uncharacteristically firey Hakeem Jeffries. Two more Republican defectors would sink the bill, but it's hard to imagine that happening under these political circumstances. Unless Trump wants the shutdown to continue, the House will pass this bill and the government will reopen shortly.
Trump likes shutdowns—they provide opportunities to do things like meddle with the social safety net and terrorize the civil service—but he's likely ready for this one to be over. The bill only funds the government through January 30th, which means Trump can claim victory, indulge in some traditional War on Christmas pageantry, then force another shutdown in the new year if he wants to. Maybe he'll succeed in eliminating the fillibuster this time, or attach intolerable amendments to the continuing resolution and argue that the Dems did it first. Perhaps the Supreme Court will officially allow him to fire federal workers at will. Thanks to these moderate quislings, he'll have an easier time doing all these things in January.
What The Dems Gave Up
On the surface, this shutdown happened because Affordable Care Act subsidies, established in 2021 to help low and middle-income people afford healthcare, are set to expire at the end of the year. Their elimination will more than double annual premiums for millions of people, and a projected four million will lose their insurance entirely. Red states that declined to expand Medicaid (and therefore have more people using the ACA insurance market) will be hit hardest by this change.
If we lived in a functioning democracy, things like the ACA subsidies would not be linked to the annual budget at all. Tragically, we live in this one, where almost all bills require a 60-person Senate supermajority to advance to the floor. Budget bills get supermajorities because they have to, either to avoid a shutdown or to end one, but there’s little motivation for a senator to advance any other bill that might upset their voters or their donors. The deadlock problem is a built-in feature of American government but, thanks to decades of increasing polarization, our Congress is so gridlocked that it barely functions at all. The only dependable way to pass legislation at this point is to attach it to a budget bill, which is precisely why Democrats attempted to staple ACA subsidies onto the side of September’s continuing resolution. It was their last real chance to get the subsidies extended before open enrollment started on November 1st.
The Democrats did not invent the tactic of adding riders to a budget bill; it's a feature of the budgetary process at this point. Rather than engage in the traditional late-night haggling and dramatic last-minute rounds of voting, however, the Republicans refused to negotiate and told the Democrats to get fucked. The message wasn't subtle either; when Schumer and Jeffries went to the Oval Office two days before the deadline for what they thought would be a negotiation, our President offered them Trump 2028 merch and then posted this video a couple hours after they left:
That refusal to negotiate is what this shutdown is really about—not just over the budget bill, but over everything. Politics is negotiation. It's a bunch of sickos haggling their way to a solution that everyone can live with, even if they don't like it. Republicans have increasingly abandoned that art over the years, and have left it completely behind with Trump 2.0. By demanding a concession—any concession—in return for their vote, the Democrats were demanding the right to be treated as an opposition party rather than an Enemy Within to be sidelined and purged by any means necessary. That demand isn't about ego or manners or respect. It's a baseline prerequisite for democracy.
Republicans refused, the Democrats dug in, and the shutdown that resulted caused a lot of pain. Federal workers were either fuloughed or made to work for free, unsure if they'd even see back pay thanks to Trump’s threat to withold it from anyone he doesn’t like. Russ Vought attempted to lay off workers by the thousands, then threatened to lay off thousands more. When SNAP benefits failed to go out this month despite an existing fund designed for just such an emergency, people began to go hungry. And when states found a way to distribute some SNAP funds anyway, Trump took his attempt to claw back that money all the way to the Supreme Court.
When you cause that many people this much pain, you owe it to the people you are hurting to make that pain mean something. Either you harden your heart and play to win or you do not play at all. You do not play and give up halfway through, when the damage is done but nothing is achieved—or at least, you shouldn't.
But playing to give up is exactly what six moderate Democrats did. Senators Catherine Cortez Mastro and John Fetterman don’t count because they voted with the Republicans the entire time. Their acquiescence is contemptable, but at least they did not ask people to suffer for nothing.
These moderates are trying to proclaim victory, but most of the “concessions” they gained are sitcom legislation: they restore things to the way they were before this episode began. Federal employees fired during the shutdown get their jobs back, and federal workers get back pay. Back pay was already mandatory under current law, but maybe mandating it a second time will make Trump give a shit. Our legislative branch is fully a cargo cult at this point.
The bill restores SNAP funding to pre-shutdown levels until September 2026, as it will for the Department of Agriculture, FDA, Veterans Affairs, and legislative branch operations. The rest of the funding will expire on January 30th. This means we will do this budget pageantry all over again come January, but this time the Republicans can provoke a shutdown without hurting three of the groups that Americans find most sympathetic: veterans, farmers, and hungry children.
It is difficult to know where to begin with how stupid this is. I assume the Democrats consider the move a defensive one: after all, if veterans and farmers and children are doing all right, people won’t be as mad at them if we shut down again. This is why they lose, every time. Only the Democrats could gift-wrap what little leverage they have, hand it to the enemy, and cheerfully proclaim victory.
(If this analysis sounds cold-hearted to you, consider that everyone deserves to eat and have healthcare, not just kids or farmers or even us precious veterans, and by funding only the photogenic groups you are damning the rest to hardship. THAT’S the cold option.)
The bill does include some actual concessions, including a moratorium on firing federal workers until January 30th, which is great news for the next 2.5 months and meaningless thereafter. It also includes an additional 200 million dollars to boost security for elected representatives which, after this display of cowardice, strikes me as sensible. Anyway, sleep easy America. Your insurance is about to skyrocket, but at least our beloved congresspeople are safe from harm.
Or maybe the policies won’t skyrocket after all. Moderates are claiming victory on insurance premiums too, because they got Senate majority leader John Thune to pinky promise he’ll let them vote on whether to extend the subsidies. He hasn't promised the Republican support the bill needs to pass, and the House hasn’t promised to vote on a goddamn thing, but Thune will let the Dems dress up and go vote in the Senate. Isn’t that sweet of him?
The Democrats did manage to extract one concession that sounds meaningful: they restored the Government Accountability Office’s budget, which the former bill planned to cut in half. The original bill would also have eliminated the GAO’s ability to sue the United States government, but the new one leaves that ability intact. These changes sound vitally important and maybe even worth something until you realize that the current head of the GAO will finish his 15-year term on December 15th, at which time Trump will simply appoint one of his lickspittles and gain full control of the agency anyway.
Letting Terror Win
The moderates who caved would like you to know that they had no choice. “This was the only deal on the table,” Sen. Jeane Shaheen of New Hampshire told reporters last night. Sen. Angus King of Maine agreed. “We believe that the evidence is that what we were doing wasn’t working, and therefore let’s try something else.”
But Sen. Jackie Rosen of Nevada said it best. “President Trump and Washington Republicans are weaponizing their power in alarming ways to inflict unimaginable pain and suffering on working people,” she wrote. “Let me be clear: I will keep fighting like hell to ensure we force Republicans to get [the ACA subsidy] done.”
Rosen is being very clear, but not in the way she might prefer. The six defectors told President Trump, in the most direct way possible, that if he hurts the American people badly enough, the Democrats will cave. He can get anything he wants from them by brutalizing the rest of us.
This is why you do not negotiate with terrorists or give in to blackmail. Giving in buys a brief reprieve, sure, but all you've really done is shown your enemies that their tactics work. They’ll be back, and their threats will escalate along with their demands. These soft-hearted moderates who surrendered to spare us pain have secured an iron-clad guarantee of far worse future suffering.
Still, some say, maybe that’s the best we could do. People will be able to afford food again. Federal workers will finally receive a paycheck. Maybe people will even be able to travel home for Thanksgiving, buy holiday gifts to keep our economy chugging along despite everything. We made our point, we took a stand. Forty days is a long time. What were we going to do, keep the shutdown going forever? At least the pain is over.
But the pain is not over.
The pain is everywhere, though it’s harder to see with every passing day. An ICE thug throws a young man to the ground and drags his face across the asphalt. Brutes in masks and body armor violently abduct a day care teacher in front of her students. An unidentified goon squad arrests a father and drives his car away with his toddler strapped into the back seat, who will be returned to her family with a rash and bruises the next day. Some sackless sack-of-shit sociopath shoots a woman five times and brags about it to his friends (“I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys”)
Hundreds of incidents just like these every day, many not caught on video at all, or caught and never shared. We are no longer in the normalization stage: these things are normal now. Every day we grow more accustomed to unprovoked acts of extreme violence. We may be disgusted, but we are not shocked.
There has been good news—great news, even. Last week’s election was a triumph across the nation. Zohran Mamdani will be New York’s mayor in a few short months, and I believe he has what it takes to make America's largest city better and defend it against Trump. All across America, regular, everyday citizens are forming rapid response teams, tracking ICE, blocking arrests and getting the footage out there. Our institutions have failed, but the people are rising to the occasion.
And yet, the pain persists. The violence grows worse every day. Limiting the damage is not a winning strategy long-term, at some point we have to go on offense. We still have systemic leverage that has nothing to do with armed resistance, like depriving the federal government of funding. Or like the leverage the Dems gave up on Sunday.
I say these things and people say, you don’t understand what you’re asking. What happens if Trump decides to declare martial law or throw away the law completely? Do you know how many people will be hurt if things escalate? How many might die?
And I have so far managed to avoid screaming into their faces that people are already being hurt. People are already dying. You’re just learning not to see it.
You want a painless way out? There’s one on offer if we’re willing to pay the price. All we have to do is give them whatever they want in exchange for the scraps they throw our way. We tell ourselves we had no other choice, we’re limiting the damage and making the best of a bad situation. We shut our ears to the screams of the abducted and our eyes to the sick and the impoverished. We tell ourselves it’s not so bad: wait till the midterms, wait till 2028, wait till Trump dies and all of this evaporates like morning dew. Until then, we just need to keep limiting the damage and making the best of our bad situation and circle the wagons and shuffle backwards when that circle grows smaller, smaller, smaller as the evil gnaws the edges down. And when the violence that we feared all along pours down upon us, we will find ourselves without teeth or claws and perfectly suited to life inside America’s Golden Age. It won’t hurt much. It won’t feel like anything at all.
Not that my strategy is working out particularly well either. I am slowly losing my mind, and while I don’t think anyone decent can be well under these circumstances it may be a bad idea to listen to me about anything right now. Good things are happening, good people are everywhere, we are all doing our bit and we will get through it and of course there is hope, but there is so much darkness too. It overwhelms the senses. You can’t stand the pain and so you feel nothing until it hits like a tsunami, drags you into the ocean and drowns you and spits you back onshore, numb once more, to stagger onward until the next wave hits, again and again, forever.
What is there to do but swim? Hard heart, soft heart—both, and neither. Making peace with the pain, learning to embrace it and then let it go. Seeing the beauty too. Letting it all live inside us, all at once, somehow. I’m not doing a very good job right now, but maybe that’s OK. I’d rather be a sick human than a healthy human animal.