The Real Reason for the Shutdown: Progressive Hatred of Donald Trump
Our long national nightmare is over, but the Democratic psychodrama isn’t. The longest shutdown in U.S. history — with increasing pain points across the country, especially among travelers — is finally ending, while the Democratic recriminations are just getting started.
“It’s complete BS,” was a relatively mild take on the deal from one congressional progressive.
As a rule of thumb, government shutdowns are bootless exercises. They don’t work because the party that causes the shutdown, thinking it will provide leverage, invariably gets blamed for the shutdown and then — surprise! — ends up in a worse position than where it began.
Democrats managed to escape the worst political fallout from their weeks-long refusal to fund the government. Otherwise, the tactic failed, and predictably so.
No Democratic senators have been seen wearing T-shirts saying, “I caused disruption and heartache for millions, and all I got was a meaningless promise for a lousy vote,” but they would be apt.
The shutdown was supposedly all about securing more Obamacare subsidies. This connection was entirely arbitrary, though. At the beginning of the shutdown, the Democrats spun the wheel, and the bouncing ball landed on “health care.” They just as easily could have picked immigration, climate, or LGBTQIA+ policy as the reason.
The advantage of health care is that it’s the one issue where Democrats still have a significant advantage. They maintained it was so imperative that Republicans extend forever Obamacare subsidies first passed in 2021 and then re-upped in 2022 under Joe Biden — without a single Republican vote — that it was worth shutting down the government over.
Republicans have sounded defensive about health care, but the Democratic demand was so extravagant, and the bad faith so obvious, that the GOP wasn’t going to cave. Sure enough, the GOP held firm, and as the shutdown began to bite, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reduced the ask to a one-year extension of the subsidies.
When that went nowhere, a band of relatively moderate Democratic senators broke ranks to support a deal for a Senate vote on continued subsidies. Not a guarantee of passage. Not even a promise of a vote in both houses of Congress. No, just a Senate vote that will probably fail.
No wonder progressives are livid, but isn’t that always the case? In the Trump years, to be progressive is to feel an implacable sense of impotence and rage.
This was the real reason for the shutdown — it was a way to give vent to an unreasoning hatred of Donald Trump.
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2025/11/12/the-shutdown-was-pointless-and-dumb-by-rich-lowry/