We Capitulated. What Now?

I wrote in this newsletter last Monday that “Senate Democrats have made it clear they will not vote for the continuing resolution unless the Republicans agreed to extend permanently the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act markets.” But then they capitulated.

Well, seven of them did, six Democrats and one independent, none of whom are up for reelection next year (two are retiring, three won’t be up for election until 2028, and the other two not until 2030). They all said, one way or the other, that they capitulated to stop the pain that is being cast upon millions of innocent, helpless, needy, hungry people, and that’s understandable.

But it’s a Senate capitulation nonetheless, so we suddenly live in a whole new world. It’s a darker world than it was yesterday, to be sure, but there is sunlight. First, though, the dark side:

As spelled out by Robert Hubbell in his “Today’s Edition” newsletter, that there are three major parts of the deal, and the Democrats got nothing in return for their surrender.

The first part promises a future vote in the Senate on a Democratic bill to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies. But that vote is certain to fail in the Senate and therefore it will not be taken up in the House. The Democrats got nothing.

The second part “guarantees that federal employees laid off during the shutdown will be re-hired and gives federal employees backpay.” Federal law already guarantees that, and the administration’s attempts to change it are being challenged successfully in court., so again Democrats got nothing.

The third part is a promise that the continuing resolution will include bills to support the U.S. Department of Agriculture. USDA, Veterans Affairs and congressional operations. But those three bills are part of a 12-bill package that the Senate is required to pass to enact the 2026 budget. Republicans could have passed those three bills at any time, but they withheld them to pressure Democrats to cave. It worked, so once again Democrats got nothing.

The Senate was our last hope in Washington to stop Donald Trump’s march to locking in his dictatorship, and because it failed he now controls all three branches of government. He already owned the House of Representatives — he has called himself “the Speaker of the House,” and the behavior of Mike Johnson, the official speaker, shows it’s true. Trump also seems to own the Supreme Court, and his control of the Executive Branch is so strong that he even owns such constitutionally independent agencies as the Department of Justice, among others. Toss in his constitutional command of the U.S. Armed Services, and his kingship is nearly complete.

But not quite complete. There are bright spots in all this gloom.

For one, the Senate refused to give Trump the end of filibustering that he had demanded. Had they done that, it would have locked in his kingly powers. He would have been able to do anything he wanted, which certainly would have included making rich folks richer and poor folks poorer, less healthy, and much hungrier.

Furthermore, as soon as the House convenes, convicted child rapist Jeffry Epstein and his connections with Trump will be back in the headlines. Speaker Johnson has been refusing to swear in Democrat Adelita S. Grijalva as representative for Arizona’s 7th congressional district because she has promised to provide the last necessary signature on a petition to force the Department of Justice to hand over the infamous Epstein files. Trump once promised to release those files, but ever since he learned his name is in them, and what they reveal about him, he has been moving heaven and earth to keep them secret.

More encouragement comes from the historical fact that the party out of power during a shutdown usually is the one that relents, but then does very well in the following election. After the 2013 shutdown, when Barack Obama was president, Senate Republicans admitted they lost the fight (they had wanted to strip funding for Obamacare) but a year later they picked up nine Senate seats and took control of the chamber, and in the House they fattened their majority by picking up 13 seats. Then, after the shutdown in 2018-19, when Trump was president the first time, Democrats took control of the Senate and the House and made Nancy Pelosi speaker for the second time.

And don’t forget the further good news in all the polls that now show Trump’s popularity continues to plummet. Most polls put it in the 30s now, which is the lowest any president has ever had at this point in his reign, and those polls are backed up by Democrats’ extraordinary showing the elections earlier this month.
Even more: The enhanced subsidies will be felt the most by people who live in states that supported Trump in 2024. That will be prime on the minds of millions of people as they head to the polls next November. And Trump-led gerrymandering may not help him a bit. Every time he takes voters out of a red district and puts them in a blue district, he weakens the red district.

That is, if he’s still president then. There is no guarantee of that. We the People have been showing up at the polls and in the streets in mammoth numbers to protest Trump’s shenanigans, and we’re overloading our incumbent congresspersons with emails and phone calls letting them know we are mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. Every House member and 33 senators are up for election next November, and surely they realize, or soon will realize, that Trump is an albatross around their necks when it comes to being re-elected. It will take only a very few of them to change their minds and Trump will be successfully impeached and maybe headed for federal prison before the next election is held.

It’s up to us now – us, We the People, and us alone — to make it happen. There is no other way. We just need to keep on doing what we’ve been doing, but do it in ever-increasing numbers, and ever louder while remaining peaceful. So if you have participated in the past, please redouble your efforts. If you have not participated, please begin. Two years from today, as you look back at today, will you be proud of what you did to support democracy? Or will you have to admit that when you had the chance to stop Trump from treating our government like his personal fiefdom, you did nothing.

We’re facing a national crisis, but crisis is opportunity. We can win. We must win. We will win – but only if we participate and vote.

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