Wait, Did the Democrats Just Win a Government Shutdown Fight?
Still, it’s a deal that suggests Democrats are continuing to pay for the mistakes they made early in Trump’s second term. In January 2025, following the Democrats’ shocking election defeat, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer gave vulnerable members an opportunity to show off their hardline immigration credentials: he signaled that he would vote for the Laken Riley Act, a hardline immigration bill that had passed the House, without receiving any guarantees of amending it. That huge Invoice— which required immigrants to be detained even if they were only accused of a crime, and empowered attorneys general to sue government agencies for failing to enforce immigration laws strictly enough — was signed into law on the ninth day of Trump’s term. Schumer ultimately voted against it, but it was supported by 12 of his Democratic colleagues (and 46 of them in the House).
In some ways, Friday’s deal is reminiscent of Schumer’s deal last fall to reopen the government after 43 days. Democrats had forced the shutdown of the system over demands to restore Obamacare subsidies that were causing health care costs to skyrocket. Then, on November 8, Schumer caved and made a deal to reopen the government in exchange for virtually nothing.
The situation this week is similar. Democrats promised their voters they would use the shutdown to achieve an unlikely political victory, then agreed to end the shutdown without winning. In both cases, we observe the same approach: a reluctance to pursue a risky strategy for too long, for fear of taking the lion’s share of the political blowback. I would say it made more sense to backtrack this week than in November, but the overall calculation was the same. Schumer is caught in a cycle of making grassroots promises that he either has no intention of keeping or knows are unlikely to be kept.
