The Government Shutdown, Explained: Why the Democrats Walked Away Empty-Handed

After more than 48 consecutive hours of pretending to possess some semblance of a backbone, Democrats caved on Monday afternoon, coughing up enough votes in the Senate to keep the government running for two and a half more weeks. Incredibly, a shutdown caused by the collective failure of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump to wrangle their colleagues somehow ended with the Democrats extracting no concessions of substance from their Republican counterparts. This is, on the surface, a curious outcome! Perhaps a closer look at the agreement, though, will help us understand why on earth Chuck Schumer decided to solve the president's problem for him.

What's in this deal, exactly?

Republicans received a continuing resolution that funds the government through February 8. They signed off on a six-year extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program (a.k.a. CHIP), which helps cover medical care for millions of kids whose families can't afford it—and which the party allowed to expire back in September, and which they were already offering to Democrats as part of a bargain to avoid a shutdown before the shutdown actually took place. Most importantly for Republicans, the deal means that the federal government—one over which they exert complete control—spent a mere two days with its windows boarded up! The worst thing to happen to any GOP politician as a result of the shutdown, probably, is that Donald Trump missed out on his party.

Lotta concessions there. What did Democrats get in return for that haul?

Nothing, unless you count noted Supreme Court seat thief Mitch McConnell's pinky-swear promise that he would totally be down to negotiate on immigration issues, including DACA, border security, and funding for the president's wall. If the two sides don't arrive at some grand bargain by February 8, McConnell says he'll hold an up-or-down vote in the Senate on legislation that would resolve the status of DACA-eligible immigrants once and for all.

So, a promise to acknowledge an already-rapidly-approaching meteor of domestic policy, basically.

Yeah.

Wait...

Yeah.

The Democrats' prize for losing this game of chicken was a promise from Mitch McConnell to "continue to negotiate"?

Yeah.

Why in God's name would Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or anyone with a pulse believe a word that comes out of the mouth of Mitch McConnell, the Voldemort of D.C., who would conveniently forget his own birthday if he believed that doing so would help him consolidate power the tiniest bit further?

Okay, here's the best explanation I can come up with. In the days leading up to the shutdown and again over the weekend, Republicans repeatedly accused Democrats of holding sick kids hostage in order to negotiate on immigration. This was a breathtakingly disingenuous position, since the GOP could have passed a clean CHIP bill with bipartisan support at any point in the past four months, but glued it onto the spending bill at the last second in hopes it would coast through Congress sans a DACA fix. At one point, Mitch McConnell resorted to tweeting out cutting room-floor dialogue from the climactic final scene of a movie about an elite hostage negotiating team.

McConnell and Ryan also framed the shutdown as harmful to America's military, pointedly ignoring the fact that the military continues functioning during a shutdown—and that during the last one, Congress unanimously passed a bill to ensure that service members were paid as usual. But if all else fails in politics, shouting about THE TROOPS tends to move the needle in one's favor, and Democratic party leaders started worrying that they would get as much blame for the shutdown as the party that controls the White House, the House, and the Senate.

Accepting this deal, the argument goes, narrows the issues. With CHIP no longer available to Republicans as a, uh, bargaining chip, the next great debate will be focused squarely on immigration. If the party doesn't have a DACA consensus by the new deadline, and if the government shuts down again as a result, then that shutdown will be fully and completely on the GOP.

So you're saying we might do this whole thing again in a few weeks?

Maybe! The Republican Party's dilemma (still) looks like this: The only immigration bills that can clear the House are going to be pretty conservative, because Paul Ryan doesn't have the support to do anything without the backing of the Freedom Caucus types in his party. Meanwhile, the GOP's slim majority in the Senate—already the more moderate chamber—means that McConnell needs a handful of Democrats to sign off on bills that he wants to pass. Anything that gets through the Senate becomes perilously centrist for the House, and anything that passes the House risks being too extremist for the Senate. Ryan and McConnell have been shouting about the military and CHIP because doing so was easier than trying to solve their intractable internal schism. Keeping the government funded until after the Super Bowl isn't going to make that go away.

If the government shuts down because the Republicans can't get their house in order, isn't that a good thing for Democrats?

Sure, if you prefer politics to be a game of wins and losses. But as of now, DACA is set to expire on March 5. Every day that Republicans spend shrugging and stammering about a still-undefined solution—and every day that Democrats agree to keep waiting for it—is one day closer to the date on which 700,000 young immigrants would become subject to immediate deportation. The window in which Democrats can show courage is closing quickly, and the meager concessions they won this time around don't guarantee any kind of satisfactory resolution.

What might this long-awaited DACA bill look like?

From the Atlantic:

Yes, today's deal means that Democrats in the House are "preparing to negotiate" the details of a proposal that, as of right now, doesn't even exist.

Are there any infuriating quotes from gullible Senate Democrats attesting to McConnell's trustworthiness?

There are! Here's Montana senator Jon Tester:

Delaware's Chris Coons:

Maine's Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats:

What kind of message does it send to the millions of people who turned out on Saturday to protest the very existence of this morally and intellectually bankrupt administration when the political party that purports to care about protecting our most vulnerable fellow Americans looked like it was going to take a stand, and then suddenly got cold feet?

Great rhetorical question.

Is there any reason to think, even if the Senate were to craft and pass a bill that could somehow also make it through the House, that Donald Trump would sign it?

None whatsoever.

Why?

Because Trump has already ruled out one such option. (The bipartisan Durbin-Graham proposal, you may remember, is what prompted Trump to unleash a racist diatribe that ended with him referring to African countries and Haiti as "shitholes.") As long as Tom Cotton and Stephen Miller and John Kelly keep taking shifts hanging out in the Oval Office to ghostwrite the administration's immigration policy, don't expect that dynamic to change.

So if all we're doing is hurtling towards another possible shutdown, why did Democrats decide to allow this one to drag on for more than two days, instead of simply pocketing the CHIP extension, clearing the agenda of everything other than immigration, and allowing this unworkable Republican majority to hang itself when their self-imposed DACA deadline arrives?

I have no idea. Some things are explainer-proof.

Fine. To whom should I direct such questions instead?

Your senators and your members of Congress. Only two and a half weeks to go.