Tonight, while much of the country slept, the Senate struck a deal to reopen the government. By the time you read this, the headlines will celebrate this as relief. Commentators will call it a win for stability. The markets will lift. There will be applause for the return of “function.” But anyone paying attention knows this is not a victory. It is a moral and strategic humiliation.
The deal restores government operations but strips out the guaranteed extension of the enhanced Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) subsidies that have kept healthcare “affordable” for more than twenty million Americans. These subsidies were not luxuries. They were lifelines. Without them, families will soon see their monthly premiums rise (into the thousands of dollars in many instances), and millions of people will once again find themselves priced out of basic medical care.
The Democrats held every card. They had the moral high ground, the political momentum (flipping multiple red strong holds and Zohran Mamdani to name a few things), and public support. And still, they folded.
This is not compromise. It is collapse.
I am a Democrat, and I am disgusted. I am someone who has spent the past few weeks raising money to help families who lost SNAP during the shutdown. I have heard from parents who could not afford groceries, to federal workers visiting food banks, to elders deciding which prescription they could skip. I have seen the pain this shutdown caused, and to know that it all ended in surrender makes me furious.
Chuck Schumer led this deal, and he should lose his position immediately as Senate Minority Leader. His leadership has been defined by fear disguised as pragmatism. Once again, he has proven that he is more interested in being seen as a negotiator than in being remembered as a leader. Every Democrat who voted for this deal should be primaried. They have failed the very people they swore to protect.
The argument that reopening the government was the responsible choice is hollow. Responsibility without conviction is not leadership. It is cowardice. The same families who were forced to endure this shutdown will now face rising healthcare costs because their representatives lacked the courage to stand firm. What good is a government that reopens if it immediately abandons the people it governs?
This is not strategy. It is surrender performed as governance.
The Democratic establishment has once again mistaken survival for success. The logic is always the same. They fear being blamed for chaos, so they rush to end it, no matter the cost. They convince themselves that “normalcy” is the goal, even when normal means inequality, suffering, and an endless cycle of the same failures. The result is predictable: they enter every battle with conviction and leave every battle with an apology.
The moral failure here is staggering. Democrats spent weeks telling the public that this shutdown was about protecting working people, healthcare, and stability. But the deal they accepted does none of those things. It offers temporary calm at the expense of long-term harm. It rewards obstruction and teaches the opposition that the party can always be pressured into retreat.
Schumer’s defenders will insist that the public wanted the government open, that there was no choice but to yield. That is nonsense. The public also wanted lower healthcare costs, reliable wages, and leadership that stood for something. A party that claims to represent working people cannot keep abandoning them whenever the pressure rises.
Reopening the government without protecting people’s access to healthcare is not relief. It is betrayal.
Every Democrat who supported this deal should have to explain to the families who will see their premiums spike why they thought this was acceptable. They should have to explain to the workers who went weeks without pay why they chose the path of least resistance. They should have to explain to every young voter why courage only seems to exist in campaign speeches and never in the moments when it actually matters. They should have to explain to the millions worried about feeding their children because they lost SNAP and WIC, what the point to their struggle was.
This is not about one negotiation. It is about what the party has become. The Democrats are now a coalition of people who know how to speak about justice but rarely fight for it. They know how to tweet outrage, how to fundraise off empathy, how to sound compassionate on television. But when it is time to use power, they shrink from it. They confuse civility with strength. They confuse maintaining the system with improving it.
The Democrats did not end a shutdown. They ended the illusion that they still possess courage.
Chuck Schumer should step aside. Every Democrat who voted for this deal should face accountability. And the rest of us, the ones who still believe that politics can be something more than survival, have to decide if we are going to keep pretending that this version of the party deserves our trust.
The government will reopen, but something far more important closed. The belief that moral conviction still has a place in the current Democratic “leadership.”
And that is not a policy loss. That is a spiritual one.
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